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​
​In today's rundown:

• Building a “boring” SEO moat
• How to create keyword clusters
• An AI SEO tool used by top brands
• SEO Director’s cut on outdated SEO practices

Read time: 12 mins

Think Piece: On Building an SEO Moat Around Your Business

Having a strong competitive advantage is crucial to stand out in today’s crowded marketplace.

And one of the most powerful ways to differentiate your business is to build an SEO moat.

But what exactly does an SEO moat mean?

Essentially, you want to develop assets and tactics that are difficult for competitors to replicate.

This earns you more organic visibility and traffic over time.

While a flooded market makes breaking through the noise extremely difficult, a robust SEO moat allows you to effectively dominate the search results and funnel qualified visitors to your site.

Essentially, an SEO moat prevents competitors from easily emulating the unique strategies and proprietary resources you’ve created around your brand and offerings.

I’ll be honest with you - It takes considerable time and effort to build an effective SEO moat.

But the long-term benefits of owning your niche and positioning your brand as an authority make the investment well worth it.

Here are 5 ways to build an SEO moat for your business:

1. Create Content Competitors Can’t Outrank

The best way to build authority and own search results? Develop high-quality, in-depth content assets like:

• Ultimate guides
• Research studies
• Case studies
• Niche toolkits

Make sure to:

• Target keywords with high-intent
• Optimize pages for ranking and conversion
• Promote heavily with outreach

This content will strengthen your domain authority and boost rankings.

2. Leverage Data Competitors Don’t Have

Unique data is an SEO goldmine. You can source it through:

• Customer research
• Proprietary studies
• Exclusive deals
• User-generated content

Turn data into assets like comparison articles, customized landing pages, and lead magnets.

Competitors can’t easily replicate unique data.

3. Own Your Niche’s Conversation

Actively participate in your niche and establish your brand as a thought leader. Ways to own the conversation include:

• Active social media engagement
• Discussion forums
• Industry interviews
• Guest columns

Don’t just promote your content. Provide value and build relationships.

4. Prioritize Technical SEO

A fast, secure, optimized website strengthens rankings. Technical SEO investments like:

• Site speed optimizations
• Core web vitals improvements
• Link building
• URL structure

5. Build an Owned Audience

Owned channels like email lists, communities, and push notifications keep users coming back.

Nurture these high-intent users with:

• Lead magnets
• Value-added content
• Special offers

An owned audience is yours to keep. Competitors can’t take it away.

Building an SEO moat takes time and commitment.

It’s boring.

But the long-term payoff is worth the investment.

SEO in Action: How to Create Keyword Clusters

The biggest keyword research mistake—optimizing your content for 1 keyword.

Your content will lack depth & ranking high will be challenging.

The solution—KEYWORD CLUSTERS.

Here’s how you can create keyword clusters from 100s of keywords in a few minutes:

Step1: Extract a list of 200 to 300 keywords using SEO tools.

Have a mix of informational, discovery, & transactional kws.

Ensure these are relevant to your business.

Step 2: Sign up for the Keyword Insights’ “Keyword Clustering Tool.”​

They have a $1 free trial.

Step 3: Upload your list.

The tool will group your kws into topical/SERP-based keyword clusters.

Step 4 & 5: Identify primary keywords & map the keyword clusters to existing/new URLs.

For more detailed steps check out our Notion resource here.​

Fav Links of the Week

Programmatic SEO for beginners [LINK]

SEO + CRO framework for B2B businesses [LINK]

News on Google’s Nov 2023 Core update [LINK]

Google SGE’s impact on users’ search behaviour [LINK]

How to grow a LinkedIn account entirely using AI [LINK]

SEO graphic design checklist [LINK]

Community-driven SEO will blow up in 2024 [LINK]

Growing from 0 to 10k visitors/month for niche websites [LINK​

SEO + AI Tool

This week our spotlight is on Clearscope.io, one of the highest-rated tools used by big brands like G2, Adobe, and YouTube.

It is an AI-powered content optimization platform that analyzes your existing content and provides specific recommendations.

One of the best features of this tool is its seamless integration with WordPress and Google Docs to make the entire content workflow super easy.

Director's Cut

​Sanjay Shenoy is a partner at Boringmarketing.com and the Director of Search. He’s been in SEO for 14 years and has trained over 1000 students in the latest organic search strategies. Every week, he’ll share answers to the most common questions we receive:

Q: What are some of the outdated SEO practices that we should avoid?

A: It’s almost 2024, and people are STILL using certain outdated SEO practices.

Here are the 3 SEO practices that can do more harm than good:

1. Keyword density:

Stop aiming for that 2.5% keyword density nonsense.

It’s irrelevant today.

Yes, keywords are important, but no, you don’t have to use them a specific number of times for Google to understand what your content is about.

Google is far more advanced today and can understand your content by understanding the relationship between the different words.

2. Article spinning:

It blows my mind that some people still do it.

Article spinning is when you try to repurpose your content by changing the words, and phrases and making different variations.

Look, it may work some churn and burn affiliate websites but if you are building something long-term and substantial, forget about it.

3. Directory submissions

Again, there are some directories that you would want to be on but not purely for SEO.

But if you are submitting your website to 1000 directories purely to rank better, believe me, you are only going to tank.

Which other outdated SEO practices do you think people should avoid?

What other questions would you like me to answer? Hit reply & send all your questions my way.

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