Can I SEO without unique content?

Well, the short answer to that one is that you really can’t. You have to have content of some sort.

Longer answer
Here’s a question: If search engines rank site on relevance, meaning in many cases authority and expertise, how do you demonstrate authority on a subject without content? The answer is that you can’t. You need content.

But many SEO experts are stopped when they are confronted by the words “unique content”.  Let’s say you sell a hundred different types of widgets in a e-commerce website, where just a few things differentiate one item from another.  You are sweating it because the content looks very similar - similar format, similar information. You are afraid that your pages will get dinged by a duplicate content ruling and possibly getting dropped from the index.

Well, here’s what you do.

• Concentrate on the differences by cascading your keywords.
  Working on a database driven catalog I was confronted by thousands of entries of a similar product - with small differences.  Adding those differences such as color, size, and any other minutiae that differentiate one item from another in the Title, Meta Description, Meta Keyword and content helps the Search Engines differentiate them as well. Having a match on all those items will go a long way to determining for the SEs what the page is about.

  The way to think about it is to cascade keywords: meaning if the keyword phrase is in the Title tag it very well should be in the Meta description. And if it is in the Meta Description, it should very well be in the Meta Keywords. And if it is in the Meta Keywords, well it better damn well be in the content for sure! Having that sort of handoff for each items will strengthen the “theme” of the keywords for a page and thus help you to rank for those terms.

• Tell the SE’s what a page is about by linking well internally.
  Having additional links in to a page from other internal pages helps you determine for the search engines what a page is about. Having additional links to a page saying it is a “large blue widget good for indoor use” will tell the SEs that the page is about a ”large blue widget good for indoor use”. If the SE’s find a match from the text on the link to the content on the page, then the page has a better chance for ranking well on those terms.
• External links.
  If a page is well-defined by doing the methods described above, then external pages will tend to link to the page using the terms you desire. The page will be well-defined, or siloed, and has a better chance of being ranked well because the subject matter has been narrowed. 

  Many times internal pages rank better for keywords than homepages. The reason is that homepages are like magazine covers - their job is to get you deeper into the site by flashing the headliners and main content.  Their content is about the WHOLE site and not just one particular section. Home pages for websites are often the same. And pages about everything are the equivalent of pages about nothing - hard to SEO except in a very general sense.

• Do everything else.
  There are over a hundred factors influencing the search engines. If you are stopped from doing something because of a technical or business rule problem - don’t let that stop you optimizing efforts.

  There are web pages out there with very little “unique” content, but are so well linked by other sites that they rank well despite that.

  There are web pages with tons of unique, valuable content that go on for pages, but do not rank well because they have no external links from other websites. Links are votes and since no one recognizes the web pages significance those pages get dropped, even with tons of unique content.

  The moral is: don’t let one item, however significant from an SEO perspective, stop you. Keep doing all the other things you know how to do.

I think that’s why I come off as somewhat cavalier at work in terms of SEO. If told there’s a “business” reason why something can’t be done I typically say, “don’t worry about it.” I say this because I have a whole arsenal of SEO methods that I can bring to bear. It’s like telling Genghis Khan he can’t use his foot soldiers. Who cares: he has 300,000 horsemen. He’ll use those instead. Don’t be stopped by any one thing - do everything else. Be unstoppable in your SEO efforts.