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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:

• Why your current SEO strategy may be broken
• Fav links of the week
• An SEO prompt to ideate content clusters
• SEO Director’s cut on the best way to approach link-building

Read time: 11 mins

Think Piece: On Why Your Current SEO Strategy Maybe Broken

I’ve been an entrepreneur for the past 10 years, experimenting with multiple businesses.

Since I launched BoringMarketing .com in April, I’ve spoken to 100s of business owners—D2C, B2B, SaaS, Creators, fellow agency owners, and more.

And I’ve seen people give up on SEO/organic growth too quickly because the foundation on which their SEO strategy is built is broken.

So, today I’m going to break down the 4 most common mistakes that I see businesses (especially in their early stages) make with respect to their organic growth strategy.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

Mistake #1: Not Building Brand Authority From the Start

A recent study by Glen Allsopp involved analyzing SERPs for 250,000 keywords to answer the question—”Do sites owned by large media companies attain more first-place rankings than independent webmasters?

And guess what?

The answer was a BIG yes!

When a content-focused site ranked first across 186,444 Google search results, 86.1% of the time, it was owned by a large media brand.

A “digital goliath”.

So, why not take the “digital goliath” approach to SEO?

Digital giants like the New York Times and WebMD invested heavily in establishing authority before trying to monetize readers. They published wide-ranging, informative content to position themselves as trusted voices readers rely on.

Their domains became hubs recognized as reputable industry resources. This authority provides a strong foundation that makes building an audience for commercial content down the road much easier.

As a newer business, you may be tempted to focus solely on driving conversions now. But failing to build authority and brand recognition from day one is short-sighted.

Don’t just target commercial keywords and optimize for sales. Share your knowledge through guides, explainers, data studies, and industry insights.

Establish yourself as a leading voice that readers want to follow. Earn trust and links. Then your product content will convert better, supported by that hard-earned authority.

Mistake #2: Not Thinking Beyond Google for Organic Growth

Many businesses only look at SEO for their own site.

But Google doesn’t exist in a silo anymore. You need a presence on other platforms where your audience is active.

In fact, research shows that TikTok is the #1 search engine (not Google) that is preferred by more than half of GenZ.

So the content you create for your site? Don’t just leave it there.

Look for opportunities to repurpose it across social media, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, Reddit, and relevant online communities.

Turn written posts into short video summaries for TikTok and Instagram. Extract key stats for Twitter threads. Publish excerpts on LinkedIn as articles. Join Reddit and Quora to share your expertise.

Take a creator-first marketing approach.

Repurposing helps establish your brand across the web. It exposes you to new audiences. And it signals authority and relevance to Google, which can lift your organic rankings.

Mistake #3: Over Investing in PPC & Not Valuing Organic Growth

PPC ads can generate quick results. But businesses make a mistake relying on them too heavily from the start. Ads come with significant downsides.

As you scale, costs increase, and competition enters. There’s constant testing and management of campaigns, creatives, landing pages. And total dependency on the ad platform.

That’s why smart companies invest early and equally in SEO. It creates an asset you own.

Google sends you targeted visitors for just the cost of content. Traffic compounds over time as your rankings improve.

Too many businesses view SEO as an afterthought once ads plateau. By then, it’s too late to close the wide gap with competitors who focused on organic growth from day one.

Organic and paid search work best together. Avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. Invest time and budget into SEO from the start to build sustainable, scalable traffic.

Mistake #4: Sticking to the Same Old SEO Tactics

I still see SEO retainers that say, “4 2000-word keyword-optimized blog posts a month.”

While there is nothing wrong with it, this strategy is not as effective as it used to be a few years ago.

SEO never stands still. Google’s algorithm evolves constantly. But many businesses get stuck doing the same tactics that worked 5 years ago.

In 2023, the strategies driving results look very different:

• AI-assisted content workflows
• Linkable assets using no-code/low-code tools
• Automating repetitive SEO tasks
• Going multichannel by repurposing content
• Community-driven SEO
• Programmatic SEO

Businesses that refuse to evolve their SEO will be left behind, doing the same things over and over again.

It is time to shift your gears from revenue-neutral SEO to revenue-focussed SEO.​

Keep learning and testing new approaches instead of relying on outdated tactics.

****

Those are the biggest setbacks that may be keeping you away from the organic growth you deserve.

In one of the upcoming newsletters, I’ll dig more into each of these topics.

Fav Links of the Week

Google SGE can generate images now? [LINK]

How to measure and track link building [LINK]

5 rules for accurate keyword research [LINK]

10 SEO tasks you cannot ignore [LINK]

Top 3 Google ranking factors that really matter [LINK]

More LinkedIn collaborative articles will appear in search [LINK]

Must-Try SEO Prompt

Today’s prompts is to ideal content clusters relevant to your business.

Though you may not be able to use this as it is, you can use it as a reference to get new ideas for increasing the topical authority of your site.

Use this prompt:

“My website covers [describe your niche, industry and topics in 2-3 sentences]. Please come up with a list of 15 potential content clusters we could create content around.

For each cluster, provide:

• A name or title summarizing the theme
• A 2-3 sentence description explaining the topic and goal of the cluster
• 5 target keywords or keyphrases an article in that cluster could potentially rank for
• 5 related subtopics or angles we could cover with additional pages in the cluster

Make sure the cluster names, keywords and subtopics are relevant to my niche of [restate your niche]. The clusters should offer a logical way to group our content and help us rank for a variety of keywords. Be as specific as possible in your suggestions."

Try this and let me know if it was helpful.

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 is the best way to approach link-building?

A: Passive link-building!!

Let me explain.

10 hours of ACTIVE link building = x backlinks

But, 10 hours of PASSIVE backlink building = 10x (or even 100x) backlinks

Here’s how you can build passive backlinks that yield 100x results:

To build passive backlinks, you must first understand the meaning of active and passive backlinks.

Let’s understand this with the example of active and passive income.

Active income:

• You get paid for the time you put in
• Not highly scalable
• Earning potential is limited
• The effort-to-reward ratio remains constant

While passive income is better because:

• It is highly scalable
• The sky is the limit when it comes to the earning potential
• The effort-to-reward ratio keeps growing exponentially

Similarly, building backlinks through outreach can be considered active backlink building:

• Outreach is a numbers game. It’s not highly scalable.
• You get backlinks only when you reach out
• The effort-to-reward ratio remains constant
• ROI is significantly lower

But there’s a better way:

You can EARN backlinks in a passive way.

This will happen when you strategically create high-quality “link-baits”.

These link-baits will automatically bring in backlinks to your site in a passive way without you having to actively reach out to people.

Passive backlinks are better because:

• Backlinks come looking for you instead of you reaching out to people
• Effort-to-reward ratio increases over time
• One piece of content/resource can bring in backlinks for years
• ROI in terms of time, effort, and money is high

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

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