Good SEO, and in turn good business, is building a defensible flywheel (brand, content, links) that gets better as you go.

I want to share some examples of companies that have done a good job of this in ways that aren't "be AirBNB" that aren't that useful:

1/ @LatticeHQ's "Resources for Humans" community -- 10,000+ strong.

This concept of a niche, free Slack community from a business has taken off and I believe started first w/ Lattice.

Being the first mover on a quality community in a niche w/o one = moat.

2/ @NerdWallet's calculators w/ almost perfect UX.

UX perfection is arguably possible with a simple calculator. You can't get much better than https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator or https://www.nerdwallet.com/investing/retirement-calculator.

By getting to perfect first, you by default build a moat w/ link authority.

Since competitors can only really be 0.0001% better which is imperceptible to ranking algorithms, NerdWallet will continue to rack in passive links from these assets, which in turn power everything else+defend rankings.

NerdWallet has 5 calculators with >500 LRDs.

3/ @SoftwareAdvice's review volume of B2B software vendors.

This company has been compiling software reviews for 10 years, and was one of the first to do it. These companies do not turn over like restaurants.

By nature, this makes them competitively almost impossible to catch.

4/ @Nextiva's customer service post.

Like NW, this asset is unlikely to be beaten as long as it stays updated, because they've created a quality moat.

It's close to perfect for a topic that will passively acquire links, forever. It currently has 457. https://www.nextiva.com/blog/customer-service-statistics.html

To recap, some of the core ways most can build SEO moats:

1/ Build near-perfect, evergreenish content for topics w/ passive link potential such that you can't be outpaced
2/ Be the 1st to start work on compiling something without a defined quality endpoint (reviews, audience)