When creating landing pages for services and locations, the second biggest challenge web creators face is coming up with fresh and unique content. As discussed in our previous blog, “How the Landing Page Generator Can Boost Your Local SEO,” you can easily create and manage hundreds of local landing pages on your site. These go a long way towards filling search queries for local searches, but they do, however, introduce a new problem – duplicate content.
The duplicate content scenario shows itself whenever you create multiple pages for a service, but for different locations or cities. For example, let’s say you have a roofing company, and you provide roof replacement across a seven-county area. You could create a landing page template using Roof Replacement In City, State. You’d write a page with great content, maybe 1200 words. You could talk about all the different types of shingles, metal, tile, and other options that you have for roof replacement. But if there are 100 cities across your seven counties, you will end up with 100 copies of your roof replacement page, and the only thing that would be different is the name of the city, maybe county. You can use some variations of this but the content would always be the same.
According to many sources, Google will pick up on this duplicated content, and may have a difficult time determining ranking or at best, those pages may compete with each other. If you’ve ever gotten to the end of Google search results, you may have seen the infamous “there were more results like these, but only the most relevant ones were shown” message. This is often because Google decided those pages were duplicates of the ones it already showed you. Well, if you have one Roof Replacement page per city, you want 100 roof replacement pages indexed and served out when appropriate.
You could write content and then farm it out using outsourcing and have someone attempt to re-write 100 versions of the same landing page. This would have to be done with every service you want landing pages for. Can you imagine maintaining 100 unique pages for each service? What a nightmare that would be!
Some companies have created plugins that solve this problem through “content spinning.” This often involves them connecting to a spin text service, and then telling the service to randomly re-word content automatically. That’s a unique approach, but it actually violates Google’s terms of service. Content should be written, not spun. So we’re back to square one.
Well, Intellasoft Plugins has a solution – the Content Randomizer. With the Content Randomizer plugin, you can create multiple versions of every paragraph of text, and it’s customizable.
You start by specifying how many paragraphs you’d like to randomize. For example, if you created 4 paragraphs for your template, and each template has one version, you would have 1 possible version of your page. If paragraph 1 has two blocks and the rest have only one block, you now have two versions of your page. If paragraph 1 has four blocks, and the rest have one, you now have four unique pages. And yes, the content is the same for three of the four paragraphs. But just watch what happens with each paragraph you add blocks to.
If P1 and P2 both have two blocks, and the rest have only one block, you now have 4 versions of the page. If you add another block to P3 you get 8 possible versions, and add another block to P4, you have 12 possible permutations. As you start adding more blocks, you quickly can reach into the hundreds or thousands. We typically will use three to four paragraphs, and create three to four blocks (or versions) of each paragraph. The result is that you can easily create as many unique pages as you like. The paragraphs may repeat, but the page is different.
Remember, the city and state will be different for each page, so that’s another element that is randomized.
Good web pages have images, and we want your landing pages to be the best out there. So we’ve built in the ability to have multiple image pools, add unique photos to the image poois, and then the images will be chosen randomly from the pool whenever an image is referenced.
For example, you might have service images – someone on a roof replacing a shingle, someone carrying shingles on the roof, etc. And you might have general images of your company trucks, etc. You can have a pool of general images, and a pool of service images, and the content randomizer will display one of those images whenever the shortcode is called.
The Content Randomizer uses shortcodes extensively to reference dynamic content, whether that is location, or an image, or a block of text. Shortcodes, if you don’t know, are placeholders for variables – for example, [paragraph_1]. The Content Randomizer lets you create multiple paragraph blocks and types of images, and then you can also create multiple “content” blocks which call those paragraphs and images, to even mix up the order of paragraphs, images, etc. By doing this, you can create pages that don’t even look the same or are in the same order.
Every time the page is refreshed, a new set of content is shuffled and returned. There is a cache mode which will set the page to be static for seven days to help with server performance, but then it will be shuffled and show new content. This is another way that the Content Randomizer updates and refreshes pages for Google, without resorting to spun or auto-generated content – all the content was manually written.
There is also a keyword and a phrase randomizer. For keywords that are interchangeable, you can define a list to pull from. This randomizes the content even further, so that now no two blocks for a paragraph are likely to be the same.
By adding the Large Market Add-on plugin, or purchasing the bundle (really, the bundle is the way to go, because all these plugins work together), you can create additional, local information content about your larger markets. So if you have a larger city that you need to show up in, you can add this large market content into the landing pages for that city. It has all the same randomizer features – multiple content blocks for multiple paragraphs, local image pools to select images from, etc. This local content can make a big difference when it comes to showing Google that the page is relevant to the searcher’s local area.
One of our customers, Mary, at Advance Restorations, has been using the content randomizer for several years now. For other customers using our products, have a look at our Testimonials page.
This is really just an overview of the Content Randomizer plugin. The Content Randomizer is an outstanding tool to take your landing pages to the next level, and elevate your pages in search results. To get more information about how the Content Randomizer and the rest of the Intellasoft Plugins can work for for you, fill out the content form below or give us a call today!
