This may sound mercantile coming from a professional content writer but your website definitely needs unique content, and in some cases, lots of it, if you want to have a competitive edge over other businesses, in terms of traction and search engine rankings.
Recently a client wrote to me that he simply wants to copy/paste content from other websites and I was amazed that even in these times people are unaware of the implications of plagiarism and publishing duplicate content on their websites and blogs. Fortunately I was able to convince him that straight copying/pasting content from other sources was a very bad idea and this could decimate his search engine optimization plans at the very least.
Why do you need unique content on your website or blog?
Simply because your business is unique, your voice is unique and so is your presence. If you have same sort of content like other websites and blogs how are people going to distinguish your presence from the others? What is going to be the difference? If you have got nothing unique and different to say about your business it means you have nothing different and unique to offer, and if you have nothing different or unique to offer why should people do business with you and not with someone else? And this can be a minor nag because people coming to your website or blog may not know that you don’t have unique content.
But the search engine algorithms will definitely know because that’s what they do: they rank well well-written and unique content and penalize duplicate and plagiarised content. You may ask why the heck they have a problem with non-unique content? It’s actually very simple. If they allow people to copy/paste each other’s content then all hell will break loose and very soon on every second link people will find the same content. Then what is the use of using a search engine? You use search engines to find relevant and useful content and you feel good when you get lots of choice. If the search engines don’t give preference to unique and relevant content you will stop using them and simply referred to a few odd directories.
Therefore it is in the interest of search engines to rank higher content that is unique and worthy.