Why does unique content matter?
Consider Janis Joplin.
On a technical level, Janis’ voice isn’t great. Her pitch is wobbly; her tone is nasal and gritty; her range is limited. There are hundreds of people waiting tables right now who can sing circles around her. Yet Janis is an enduring icon—because her voice is unique, not in spite of it. The moment she starts wailing, you would never mistake her for anybody else. She’s not a cookie-cutter karaoke star. She’s a bona fide original.
Uniqueness makes you stand out. That’s doubly true in the B2B content marketing world. It’s triply true now that AI-generated content is flooding search results with optimized but hollow content-by-volume.
Your brand’s unique personality, as expressed by your content team, can cut through the nonsense and earn attention.
Here’s what makes content unique, how uniqueness helps SEO, and what you can do to get it.
Three Ways Content Must Be Unique for SEO
We all know that content should be original, empathetic and valuable. These attributes are the price of entry—they’re the minimum. Unique content needs to also be:
Unique from AI-generated content
I had a moment of truth a few days ago. I had written an article based on a Chat-GPT outline and wanted to make sure I didn’t incorporate too much AI-ness. So I used an AI detector.
The detector flagged my 100{c87e2df4b343d0515d304e127afe4653a549475791ab451641a18e09bd64e760} original text as AI generated.
In other words, I was writing like a bot. I quickly rewrote the paragraphs in question to make sure they conveyed the human behind the text.
And now I’ve demonstrated what makes non-AI content unique: A human point of view. The previous couple of paragraphs are about something I experienced. AI doesn’t do that—it has no lived experience to draw from.
Keep your content unique from AI by:
- Bringing a singular personal perspective
- Using metaphor and analogy
- Practicing empathy for your audience
- Surfacing new ideas by drawing on past experience
AI can’t do any of these things reliably or well. Make sure your content won’t make anyone wonder if it was written by robots.
Unique from other brands’ content
If your content was stolen and published on a competitor’s site without your branding, would anyone be able to tell? Would your brand’s experience, insight, and personality shine through?
There are a few ways to make sure your content couldn’t come from anyone else, including your competitors:
- Tell unique brand stories. Talk about your customers, your years of service, your employees. Weave these brand stories into every piece of content.
- Take strong stances on industry issues. Be opinionated and even passionate about the problems facing your industry and your proposed solutions.
- Let personality shine through. The stiff, corporate, disembodied “B2B voice” is a thing of the past. Write as a person, for people.
Unique from your previous content
Most B2B brands have been pushing out content for years, if not decades. That means the very real danger of ‘too much of a good thing.’ If you have multiple pieces of content angling for each keyword you’re targeting, your site’s SEO potential is getting diluted.
For example, you might have a dozen similar thought leadership posts about sustainability. Each post is competing with content from other businesses, but each one is also competing against your other content. It’s hard for any one of your posts to rise in the search results against that much competition.
To avoid competing with your own content, it’s worth performing a thorough content audit to:
- Identify thin or repetitive content
- Determine which content can be refreshed and which should be redirected
- Identify opportunities for creating new content
Quality is the new quantity
The gold rush for quantity content is over. It’s time for us B2B content marketers to get back to our roots: Creating high-quality, empathetic, meaningful content that inspires and moves people. Let’s aim to be Janis Joplin: Memorable, genuine, even rough around the edges, and completely unforgettable.
Ready to make your brand stand out from the crowd? We can help.
About the author
Joshua Nite is dedicated to bringing humanity, empathy, and humor to content marketing. His two ironclad rules: Never settle for commodity content, and never write anything you wouldn’t want to read. Great writing takes heart, soul, guts and rhythm. Josh is also the once and future Pundamonium Pun Slam champion, a stand-up comedian and storyteller, and is getting pretty good at electric guitar. His only weakness: Extreme self-consciousness when writing about himself in the third person.