The web is rife with duplicate or poorly worded content. Many search marketers put out material on the web solely to provide contextual back-links. Usually content is duplicated or plagiarized from another source. Useless to the real world, this “fake” content only exists for the search bots.

The web doesn't need anymore of this...

There is a reason for this: it works! It works especially well if you use NameJet or DropDay to identify an expired domain with a history (PageRank, Listed in DMOZ/Yahoo/Google directory entries, and back links). Just buy related domain names, throw up some prose semantically relevant to your business, and have keyword-rich anchor texts in your back links.

But activities designed to just “game the SERPs” are just that: games. Games are bad for SEO because:

  • The web is getting cluttered with useless content.
  • SEOs that practice this must constantly outdo other SEOs that do the same and causes brinkmanship that spirals toward blackhat.
  • Outside of (maybe) obtaining a better rank, games don’t benefit the core business.

Well done SEO is a holistic process. It should permeate the entire IT infrastructure of your business. While this doesn’t mean that you need to see every decision through an SEO lens, it does mean that you need to take some time to identify your digital assets and unique content.

Some simple questions to help identify your unique content:

  • What is your mission? Why are you in business? What service do you provide? What sets you apart?
  • Do you document your work? Take pictures? Video?
  • What advice are you always repeating to new or prospective clients?

Since I primarily work in real estate, most of my SEO examples are going to come from this particular industry. Case #2, while based on a real estate office, applies to almost any industry.

Case Study #1 – Goal: Get more real estate related traffic to our website.

RE/MAX Executive Realty isn’t the largest Charlotte real estate company in terms of number of agents. It isn’t even in the top 5 when just counting heads but their agents are enormously successful in terms of individual volume. This means RE/MAX Executive is in the top 5 when it comes to revenue, transactions, and number of active listings.

Why bother mentioning this? Because in order to identify unique content opportunities, you have to find out what makes a company unique. You need their back story.

In this case, their advantage was two-fold:

  • They have a huge inventory of active listings.
  • Their agents make more money and keep a larger percent of it so they are willing to partner on marketing their listings.

5 years ago, RE/MAX Executive launched an in-house virtual tour company. Each site was a standalone site. Each site had custom written scripts that were different from the generic MLS descriptions you would find on Realtor.com (and all the other sites). Each site was tied to a specific address. Each site had professional photography.

All of these (contextual, timely, geo-specific, and unique) sites linked back to RE/MAX Executive.

Oh, and they helped the agents sell their properties faster. We kept stats back then. Properties listed with the virtual tour service sold at least 40% faster. We were doing 50+ sites a month. RE/MAX didn’t make money on the tours once the production costs were subtracted but we kept the program running for years because it helped us in three ways:

  1. It was a recruiting and retention tool for agents.
  2. It generated more sales.
  3. It generated natural back-links.

Case Study #2 – Goal: Educate our agents and recruit others to join our company.

Hadi Atri, an owner of RE/MAX Executive, is a veteran of the real estate business. While he no longer actively practice real estate, he is the Broker-in-Charge of his company’s Ballantyne office. He advocates life-long learning and encourages his agents to continually train. What separates Hadi apart is that he personally attends the training sessions himself. He is always updating or improving some part of his company.

An active, forward-thinking owner like Hadi presents several opportunities for unique content:

  • Evaluating different programs and providing case studies where a particular program improved one of his agent’s business.
  • Providing a 30-year perspective on Charlotte’s housing and business environments.
  • Promoting new programs the company is launching.

Basically, Hadi is busy…all the time. His enthusiasm for training and years of experience give him a perspective others want to hear. So we setup a blog and a twitter account and trained him on good article writing practices (and installed the Scribe Content Optimizer). The strategy helps in multiple ways again:

  1. Gives an official channel for Hadi to communicate with his agents and potential recruits about programs being offered by RE/MAX Executive.
  2. Provides a feedback channel for agents to interact with Hadi.
  3. Generates natural, contextual, and timely backlinks.

Conclusion

In both case studies, SEO was only one of the benefits. You shouldn’t do SEO just for SEO’s sake. After awhile, you’re creating too much static. SEO done right should emanate from the core of the business and enlist its principals. It’s your job to craft a system that allows your clients to create their own timely, interesting, and relevant content…and make sure that content augments their search presence.