Things Have Changed
Let’s take a quick look at your business and how it’s likely progressed over time. Initially, your business grew by word of mouth. Later, you did some level of advertising, usually starting out small in print. You developed your message and you utilized the yellow pages, or the newspaper, or television to deliver it. That worked pretty well for you.
Enter the internet. Things changed, and the world became your potential customer. How you chose to get your name out there and how well you communicated became much more important than the old ad you placed in the phone book.
At that time, ad placement could be essential. It’s interesting to think back to old phone books and how many businesses had names starting with the letter “A,” like AAA Plumbing, to attain a prominent listing. But the alphabetic approach sure doesn’t buy you much today.
The Message Is Important
Marshall McLuhan proposed that the medium was the message, arguing that the medium itself was more important than the message being conveyed. In the land of Google, though, we know that the message (i.e., content), is extremely important. It is one of the keys to driving visitors to a website. A few things to remember:
- A website needs to contain fresh, interesting, well-thought-out content. SEO marketers have been preaching that belief for years and it’s been borne out by experience and data. Good web content will bring visitors to your website.
- However, it can certainly be a struggle to keep a website fresh and current. It takes effort to keep content fresh and interesting, especially over time.
- As a website and business owner, you’re the best informed and the most knowledgeable about the products you sell, but conveying that information can require a very specific set of skills.
That is where the challenge really lies. It’s not easy to run a business and maintain a great website all at once. One possibility for boosting your site’s status is supplementing it with syndicated content.
Syndicated content is content that is made available in either summary form or as full renditions of a website’s recently added content. Additionally, there are services that will provide content for your website on a subscription basis.
Is Syndicated Content Worth It?
If you choose to use syndicated content on your website. You need to consider its benefits and drawbacks and what the implications are in using “someone else’s content.”
Benefits:
- It supplies your current audience with a regular stream of content, keeping them interested and engaged
- It provides your site with potential access to a larger audience
- These new sites may offer a new source for leads
- It can help in adding authority to your site
Drawbacks:
- The content in the articles may not be completely relevant to your business
- The content may not address the specifics of your locale
- The articles may not be specific to your customers’ needs
- Google may see the articles as duplicates and penalize your site’s rank
- Because of the content’ source, identifying leads may be harder to determine
Although the pros and cons may seem obvious, some people neglect to consider how Google regards the content on their site. Google will punish your site when it detects “duplicate content.” So, when you push your content to third party links, make sure that you provide a link back to the original source. This is explained on the Google support page.
The article should also carry no index tags. If you follow these practices, you’ll make sure that your site gets credit for your content and your SEO value isn’t negatively affected.
So before you dive in, carefully weigh the pros and cons specific to your business when deciding to use syndicated content.
