If you have a retail store, chances are you have a “storefront” website, that is a site that comes with products pre-loaded that you can feature or not feature on your website.

These sites also come with pre-written content and then your store’s name and location is simply dropped in at appropriate places.

The title and description tags are also pre-written and formatted so that your name and city can be inserted. 

This helps with search results (SEO) and is all very convenient for the local store, who doesn’t want to be bothered with the expense of custom content development.

There is a problem, though.

Copy a portion of the canned text on your website, put quotation marks around it, and pop it into a Google search bar. If you see other stores come up in the results and they all have the exact same text as yours, that can be a problem. It’s called duplicate content.

Google frowns on duplicate content and may downgrade those pages in search results.

For local stores, this isn’t necessarily a huge issue. But just the same, you might move the needle and get better results in terms of web traffic and sales, if you rewrite key pages on your website thereby eliminating the duplicate page issue.

Especially if while you’re rewriting those key pages, you insert a generous portion of heart about your particular store.

Easy Web Tip 348: Customize your text on key pages of storefront websites to get better rankings with Google.