Canned Blog Posts Won't Help Your SEO

This is a common reaction when I give presentations and tell real estate agents how important it is to blog consistently:

"Where am I gonna find the time to do that?!?"

For a lot of agents, the solution is syndicated content. I'm talking about the canned, pre-written blog posts that you can get with a subscription to services like Keeping Current Matters or from your website platform/provider.

Let me make this clear: I love Keeping Current Matters. My wife's had a subscription for years and we use it regularly to get content ideas, statistics, and even some great visuals. But we rarely use the blog posts it provides on a word-for-word basis.

A Real-World Example

Here's why: I recently looked at two different agent websites. Each one had published between 300-400 articles over the past 3-4 years. Every article on each site came from a syndicated content service (not Keeping Current Matters, for what it's worth) and every article was published word-for-word. 😬

Here's what I found in an audit of one of those sites:

• Google only had five of the ~300 articles in its index; it's as if the other ~295 don't exist

• The blog has had less than 300 pageviews in those 3-4 years

So why is the blog not performing when it's had so much content published consistently for years?

I checked all the technical stuff I know to check -- there was nothing in the site's code, nothing in the robots.txt file, nothing in the XML sitemap, etc., that would prevent Google from having those blog posts in its index.

So why is Google ignoring all those articles?

Because there are probably hundreds of agents, if not more, posting the same articles on their websites. And Google doesn't need or want hundreds of pages in its index with the same content.

Google wants original content. It wants more red eggs.

When I talk to agents, I say you need to publish consistently. I should probably say "publish original content consistently." Posting the same stuff that hundreds of other agents are posting isn't gonna help your SEO.

Final Thoughts

There's nothing wrong/bad about syndicated content services and what they offer. What's wrong/bad is taking that content, publishing it word-for-word, and expecting SEO results.

Instead, use those services for ideas to write original content. Or, if you like one of their blog posts, rewrite/edit/customize it to fit your market and your audience before publishing.

Here's a video version of this message.