What I Thought the Moat Was

The obvious candidate for the advantage in my businesses was coverage: more categories, more countries, more cities, more pages, all ranking in Google for the searches buyers actually made.

That advantage was real. The harder question is how much of it was ours.

Building the footprint

In 2011 I sent our developer a review of every topseos category, with a line at the top:

Will need to push out to other countries (where it applies) once these changes are done.

By 2013 the plan gave the strongest categories their own subdomains and carried them into India, Singapore and Canada. By 2014 we were launching web design comparison sites country by country. At its peak the portfolio was about 250 comparison platforms. (How the categories were designed.)

Footprint compounds. Every category that ranks makes the next one easier to rank.

Finding out whose it was

In September 2014 Google removed every one of our websites from its search results. The court record says it restored 50 of them by mid-November. I wrote about the lawsuit that followed here.

Whatever you think of the reasons, the effect was simple. A footprint that lives in someone else’s search results can be switched off by them. It was an advantage I was renting.

What actually kept the business alive

In 2021 a lender asked me to explain the revenue history. My answer, in part:

2019 – Reviews & Ratings Business: Focus switched from this business to focusing on the agency business.

2021 – Reviews & Ratings Business: Revival of the reviews and ratings business. Hired a full time sales rep.

Read honestly, that is not a story about a moat. It is a story about being able to move: from the rankings business to the agency when the agency was where the growth was, and back again when the moment came. The durability was in the operator, not the asset.

The one thing you cannot buy back

The rankings business ran on paid placement: providers paid to be considered and contracted for positions. That model is easy to copy, and others ran versions of it. What is not easy to copy is a reader’s belief that the page is worth reading.

In 2025 a partner agency wanted to be placed at the top across many categories. My answer:

Keep in mind if we drop you all over the site at #1; the credibility of the rankings will drop. My recommendation would be to have General and then maybe 3-4 additional in the niche categories.

Credibility was the asset the whole business sat on, and every placement decision spent a little of it.

What I would call the moat now

Later that year, asked what topseos was worth, I listed what I believe still holds:

Category-defining, keyword-rich domain (topseos.com)

Over 20 years of brand equity & authority in the SEO, PPC, Social, digital marketing space

Strong restoration potential with the right reinvestment

A name buyers recognise, a domain that says what it is, and twenty years of history. Those are mine. Google’s rankings, a partner’s budget and a pricing model anyone can copy were never moats. They were conditions.