Creating product descriptions and company homepages never required the same artistry as, say, crafting a novel – until Google changed the face of website copy forever.
With its poor rank of low quality, shallow sites and content farms in search results, Google’s Farmer/Panda update has ensured that the only way anyone will be able to find a page with low quality content on Google is by clicking far back into the search results at random or by lucky happenstance. Low page ranking is a death knell for brand promotion. But what to do now?
If your business model involves producing many websites with shallow content, this will hurt their Panda ranking. Whether or not you've made it a practice to generate regurgitated, low quality page content, if you do so now, you guarantee that the website in question will be pushed back into the inky void of Google search results – a no-searcher’s land final resting place. Instead, put out pages with high quality content that add value to the product or service being described.
Think about what makes the company and its offerings unique, and consider what information a curious visitor would want to know. What aspects of the business and its output are different from anything else on the market today? How can you word this in a manner that will attract readers’ attention, keep it, and make them feel as if they have learned new and valuable information? This is the type of quality content that the Farmer update rewards.
SEO is still a recommended tactic, but the difference now is that you won't be able to rely solely on the presence of a few relevant keywords sprinkled throughout. As always, keyword over-saturation is a no-no, but you will have to combine the ones you do use with quality, informative content.
Don’t let that content come in the form of product descriptions from other sites, or even wording straight from the manufacturer. If you can’t create entirely new descriptions, put your own spin on everything, or find someone who can do it for you. Make your content rich and unique.
Brand and product promotion are dependent on search engine rankings, which are now tethered inextricably to the quality of your website copy. While providing informative and high quality website content isn’t yet the province of novelists, the Farmer update pushes it a lot closer to an art than it’s ever been before.
