Happy Friday!

Welcome to Boringmarketing.com, where you'll find "boring" marketing tactics to grow your profits via AI, SEO, and more.
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​In today's rundown:

• Story behind Boringmarketing.com
• The current state of content SERPs
• Prompt to instantly increase content depth
• An NLP-based AI writing tool
• Director’s note on easy programmatic SEO

Read time: 9 mins

The Story Behind Boringmarketing.com

Way before digital marketing was a thing, I was fascinated by the not-so-glamorous world of direct response.

Long-form sales letters with endless paragraphs didn't win design awards. But they made money hand over fist.

I wanted to unravel the psychological triggers that compelled people (including my own dad) to pull out their wallets.

This curiosity led me down a rabbit hole of old-school copywriters - from Claude Hopkins to Eugene Schwartz. I devoured books on persuasive psychology like Influence and Pitch Anything.

Soon I was handwriting my own clumsy sales letters, trying to reverse engineer why these not-so-pretty pages converted.

From this early obsession, I saw how human behavior could be ethically influenced through carefully crafted words and strategies.

Fast forward through various entrepreneurial experiments, consulting for startups, and a stint in venture capital.

I realized almost NO ONE applied the persuasion principles I'd learned to their digital marketing efforts.

Landing pages left much to be desired. Messaging failed to compel action. Money was wasted chasing vanity metrics.

I knew I could help businesses drive growth through the psychology-based tactics I'd studied and refined for years.

Now after building a successful consultancy and Agency, that experience has culminated in Boringmarketing.

We live at the intersection of timeless direct-response wisdom and modern digital channels.

Marrying landing page psychology with SEO authority building.

Leveraging conversational marketing and the "familiarity principle."

Understanding that fundamentals like ethical persuasion outlast tricks and hacks.

Boringmarketing.com wasn't built overnight or easily. It took studying the past, testing new strategies, and playing the long game.

Turns out that a fascination with the not-so-glamorous can pay off over the long run. You just have to let the results do the talking.

Now we get to apply those learnings on a much bigger scale. And we're just getting started.

State of Content SERPs: Study of 250,000 Keywords

SEO expert Glen Allsopp recently conducted an extensive 250,000 keyword analysis examining the state of content-focused SERPs.

Some key findings from the study:

• Media brands attained 86.1% of first-place rankings versus 13.9% for independent sites.
• The top content sites were overwhelmingly owned by major media conglomerates.
• On average, media brand sites had over 8x more content than independent sites.
• Media brands focused on broad topics, while independents found opportunities in narrow niches.
• 1 in 5 sites were harder to categorize as content-focused or not. Services and tools often ranked well.

While not perfect, the large-scale analysis provides interesting insights into media domination of search and opportunities for independents.

Fav Links of the Week

Study: Google prefers original content over AI? [LINK]

Could Bard replace Google Search box? [LINK]

Ranking factors that changed in 2023 [LINK]

Free SEO tools to optimize your workflows [LINK]

How SEO teams can collaborate with other teams effectively [LINK]

Actionable tips to prepare for Google SGE [LINK]

How to create a brand SEO strategy [LINK]

Must-Try SEO Prompt

Done with your blog post research and have the outline ready. Before you get started, there is still some scope for improvement.

You can improve the topical depth of your content using this prompt.

“Review the provided blog post outline and suggest 2-3 ideas for expanding the topical depth and breadth of this post by touching on related concepts, tangents, implications, and examples.
​
Here’s the outline:

You will then be provided with supplemental subtopics, perspectives, and examples to make your post more comprehensive and useful for readers.

SEO + AI Tool

This week, our boring spotlight is on NeuronWriter.

NeuronWriter is a powerful content/SEO tool that combines natural language processing, SERP analysis, and AI generative capabilities into one integrated content editor.

For teams looking to level up their content game through the strategic application of AI, NeuronWriter aims to provide robust optimization assistance.

NeuronWriter assists with multiple stages of the content creation and optimization process:

• Conducting competitor analysis to identify gaps
• Generating relevant content ideas and outlines
• Providing AI-generated phrase suggestions while writing
• Scoring content for optimization opportunities
• Recommending related keywords to cover
• Leveraging GPT-3 for draft generation
• Automating internal linking and schema markup

The goal is to streamline the production of high-quality, semantic SEO content at scale.

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’s the easiest way to get started with programmatic SEO?

A: Comparison pages are the easiest ones to get started with programmatic SEO.

Simply check your competitors and filter their pages for terms like “vs” or “compare”, and you’ll find hundreds of keywords for comparison pages.

Once you have a set of keywords, you can start creating a template for the comparison page.

Then create and deploy pages in all possible combinations for these keywords that you found.

You can also take it one step further and do 3-term comparisons. This will help you capture more demand with the same set of database you already have.

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

Let's Get Boring

Work with us or follow along:

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2. ​Follow us on Twitter if you don’t already. We’re dropping “boring” stuff on the daily.
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