If you’ve been around the financial services industry very long you’ve probably heard at least one pitch from a group selling newsletters and websites. In fact, if you’re in the industry you are most likely using one of these services right now……. It’s ok, you’re not alone and your broker most likely doesn’t know they are slowly destroying your past, current, and future digital marketing efforts.

WHAT!?!?!

It’s true; the packaged content that is sold to you, your brokers, and your IMO/FMO as “effective” and “compliant”  might very well be doing you more harm than good.

WHY!?!?!

Duplicate Content = BAD

Search engines don’t like duplicate content because it’s viewed as a form of cheating. The short explanation of why is because search engines rank and reward websites for quality and creativity. Since creativity is a fundamental part of search-rankings, they want to ensure you and/or your firm used your own creativity to create the content on your site.

I’m not naming any names, but there are several organizations creating a tiny amount of “compliant” content for the financial services industry and selling it to thousands of advisors and firms across the nation.

What do you think happens when they see your website is EXACTLY like hundreds of others across the internet? 

If you don’t believe me, I’ll happily reference Google themselves to further explain.

Current Policy and Information about Duplicate Content: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

If you don’t want to read that, you can hear it directly from Matt Cutts who is the head of Google’s web spam team:

How-to Check if using duplicate content: 

1. CopyScape: http://copyscape.com/

The easiest and free way to check is through CopyScape. Enter your website address, submit, and out comes a report telling you what they found.

2. Google

Take a block of text from your website, add parenthesis “” to the front and back of the paragraph to do an exact-match search in Google, and see if there are any matches.

3. Call Us