Helpful content is the name of the game if you want to rank on Google these days. Unfortunately for many SEOs and their clients, what passes as “helpful” is a nebulous concept at best. Having informative content that has the intent to help does not necessarily mean that the content is helpful in Google’s view.

Having inherent elements of Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) is foundational to making sure that your content is helpful. However, those are not the only crucial elements in the equation. Now more than ever, it’s essential to have original content if you want your webpages to climb Google’s SERPs.

Originality is a prime attribute that makes content compelling and unique. It provokes curiosity because it brings something new to the table. It also keeps human users coming back to a website because they know there’s a good chance they’ll find something fresh, entertaining or even useful in its webpages. As you may guess, having content like this is correlated to all-important user engagement signals and backlinks which can propel your webpages to the top of Google’s SERPs.

Web Content Originality Explained

In the context of web content, originality means that your content introduces new ideas and creative perspectives to a topic, providing fresh and valuable insights. These insights allow the discourse to grow, thus advancing a body of knowledge. Unfortunately, many webmasters confuse originality with mere uniqueness. While uniqueness is a good thing in SEO, it’s also true that a content piece can be unique without being original.

Uniqueness in SEO means that a content piece is distinct and not duplicated elsewhere. In practical terms, any content piece that wasn’t copied word for word from a source is technically unique. However, if it doesn’t have anything new and meaningful to add, it’s also unoriginal.

Think of a blog post on how to get started with a ketogenic diet. You may have written a content piece that’s full of information, but if all the insights in the article are mere re-tellings of insights from other content pieces on the subject, it doesn’t make your article original at all. Conversely, if you write an article on the subject based on your own experience or expertise on the matter, it makes your content both original and unique.

What Makes Your Content Unoriginal?

So, what factors are contributing to the lack of originality in your content and how do you mitigate them? Here are the five most common issues:

1. Plagiarism. Involves copying content directly from other sources without proper attribution, harming your credibility and potentially leading to legal issues. What’s more, it can even damage your ability to rank on Google since the search engine has long had filters to combat redundant content that has been published in multiple webpages.

For instance, copying paragraphs from a competitor’s blog post without giving credit is a clear act of plagiarism due to the blatant infringement on the author’s copyright. To avoid this, always use proper citations and references when using information from other sources, and utilize plagiarism checkers like Copyscape to ensure your content is original.

2. Duplicate Content. Refers to replicating content from other pages on your own site or from other websites, which can confuse search engines and dilute your page’s ranking. This is pretty common on ecommerce websites where product descriptions are passed around from the manufacturer’s website to retailer product detail pages.

In some cases, the same product description may repeat on several of your own webpages due to very small differences among product variants. In other cases, merchants selling the same products within the same ecommerce website may have identical product detail copy. All of these can result in stunted or non-existent rankings.

Your first recourse is to have product descriptions written in a unique way by someone with a high degree of knowledge of the SKU. If content duplication is unavoidable, use canonical tags to indicate the preferred version of a page and focus on creating unique content for each page. Tools like Siteliner can help identify duplicate content on your site.

3. A Lack of New Insights. Occurs when you write about common information that is already widely available without adding any new perspectives or value. Writing a generic “10 Tips for Better Sleep” article without adding new research or personal anecdotes is a prime example. Even if you combine insights from various sources, the fact remains that your content adds no value to the current state of knowledge.

Conduct original research, include expert interviews, or share personal stories to contribute meaningfully to the discourse on a subject. Tools like BuzzSumo or Ahrefs can help you see what’s already been published and find gaps you can fill.

4. Automated Content Generation. Over-reliance on generative AI often results in generic, repetitive, and low-quality content – especially if you have no new insights to add yourself. For instance, simply telling ChatGPT to write an 800-word article on “Persian Kitten Care Tips” would likely result in a competent article, but readers would not find information in it that they haven’t seen before somewhere else.

At SearchWorks, we use generative AI as more of a writing and proofreading assistant rather than a substitute for human writers. In our process, writers would still field their own expertise, experiences and research while generative AI simply aids in the organization of ideas, the correction of typos, and fact-checking processes.

5. Cliché Topics and Themes. These can make your content seem redundant to everything else that’s been said, done and written across the web. Writing yet another article on “Why SEO is Important” without a new angle is an example of this. Find unique angles or subtopics within a broader theme to make your content stand out. Use keyword research tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to discover less saturated topics and long-tail keywords.

We recommend performing content gap analysis in case you want to come up with original topic ideas. You can learn how to do that here. As the name of the process suggests, this is all about finding areas within broad topics that have yet to be thoroughly explored and written about.

6. Poor Rewriting or Spinning. This involves changing a few words in an existing article without adding new information, resulting in low-quality and less informative content. Instead of spinning content, focus on creating comprehensive guides, in-depth analyses, or fresh perspectives on existing topics. Ensure that every piece of content offers something new to the reader.

Content spinning is rampant among content farms and private blog networks (PBNs) – both of which are the types of websites that Google constantly wants to bust. To avoid being treated like one, focus less on article volume and more on original, people-first literature. You’ll find that this strategy is much better at developing a reader base – a crucial element in a strong and sustainable SEO strategy.

By understanding and addressing these issues, you can ensure your content is both unique and original, significantly enhancing its value and appeal to both search engines and users.