People use mental models to understand reality, solve problems and make decisions in everyday life. SEO is no exception here, however it is not a topic you hear about often in this industry.
The point is that you have to be careful with mental models because they are insidious. We tend to develop them over the course of our lives, inherit them from our colleagues and mentors, and rely on them almost instinctively, without being fully aware of their influence or the existence of better alternatives.
So, let’s talk about mental models that you will find useful in your SEO work and the ones you should approach with caution.
3 useful mental models
In the noisy, uncertain world of SEO, they will be your north star.
First-principles thinking is a problem-solving approach that involves breaking down complex problems into their most basic elements and assembling them from scratch.
It’s about asking yourself what is absolutely true about a situation and then reasoning from there to create new solutions.
Uncertainty is a chronic ailment in SEO. And it’s by design because the entire industry is based on Google’s secrets. Access to the truth is extremely limited. We’ve gotten to the point where we’ve gotten so used to accepting SEO guesswork and theory that we’ve come to crave it.
This is where the first principles come in. Whenever you need a brand new solution to a problem, or when you feel like you’ve gone too far in speculation, go back to basics – things that have the best chance of being true in this industry. For example:
- Conventional wisdom is that higher volume is better, but the first principle of blogging is to reach qualified people and influence sales. Therefore, it is better to target specific high-volume keywords than unrelated high-volume keywords.
- The first principle of SEO content is distribution through the organic search channel. That’s why it’s so hard to promote it on other channels like social media — better off.
- Google aims to provide the best possible experience by providing the most relevant and high quality content. However, some people ignore this first principle, try to game the system and lose everything almost overnight when the system catches up.
The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) is about a disproportionate relationship between inputs and outputs, effort and results, or causes and effects. A small number of causes (20%) often lead to a large number of effects (80%).
This idea is named after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who, in 1906, observed that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population.
If we use this principle as a mental model in decision making, it will be easier to prioritize work. It’s okay to ignore some things because they probably won’t matter that much. The result you’re looking for will come from focusing on the things that are likely to have the most impact rather than stretching yourself too thin.
For example, if you want to build links to your website, showcase your best content. This can be content that has already been proven to earn links in the past.
Or if you need to recover some of that lost traffic, go to the pages that lost the most traffic.
The key is to treat the 80/20 as an approximation, as a heuristic, and not take the numbers literally. For example, about 80% of our website traffic comes from no more than 6% of pages.
But on the other hand, if we try to find the top 20% pages that contribute the most traffic, we will find that they do not bring 80% traffic, but 96.8%. Any way you look at it, the idea still holds – a small number of causes led to a large number of results.
“It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.”
It already sounds a lot like SEO, doesn’t it?
This quote is from “Through the Looking-Glass” by Lewis Carroll and is how the Red Queen explains to Alice the nature of her kingdom where constant effort is required just to maintain one’s current position .
It was used to name a theory of evolutionary biology that holds that each species must adapt and evolve not only for incremental gains but also for survival, as their competitors also evolve. Sorry, we’re in a never-ending race.
You can probably already guess how this applies to SEO rankings. If you want to maintain high rankings, you can’t stop improving your pages. There will always be enough competitors to challenge your position.
But in our world, the pressure comes from competitors and the environment. Google continues to evolve as well, pushing the bar for content higher, making elements that gave you an edge on a template.
I’m sure we’ve all been there – even the top backlink-earning, top-traffic, and time-consuming content gets pushed to the bottom. But if you keep optimizing, you have a chance to get back to the top.
This mental model is another way of saying that SEO works best as an always-on strategy with no set end date or end goal.
3 mental models to watch out for
It’s not so much about avoiding them but being able to spot them when they happen or can happen.
A local maximum (also known as a local optimum) refers to a solution that is the best solution in a neighboring set of solutions, but not necessarily the best possible solution overall (global optimum).
So if you feel like you’re expending enormous effort just to make marginal improvements, you have to be willing to assume you’ve hit a local maximum. Then the question is: what can I do differently?
Here is an example.
Until November of last year, traffic to our site was a series of local optima. Our content marketing delivered results, but growth was relatively slow. Obviously, we did the same tried and tested things. But then we started two programmatic SEO programs that immediately took us to a level that would have taken us years to work for — see how quickly the yellow line (pages) grew and how it matched the orange line (traffic).
The sunk cost fallacy is a cognitive bias that occurs when people continue to do something as a result of previously invested resources (time, money, effort) despite new evidence suggesting that the current course will not lead to a beneficial outcome.
We all know SEO is a long-term game, right? Strategies like these are full of long-term projects with large investments of time and money. Sometimes, despite investment, you just can’t get past a certain level of traffic, backlinks, etc.
Now, that mental model, that voice in your head, will tell you to keep going no matter what. Loss aversion kicks in, acting as a defense mechanism for yourself and your past actions. And the more aggressive and blind the “hustle” culture in one’s team, the harder it is to see clearly.
But, in general, it could be better for you and the company to drop it and focus on something else. You can even come back to it later with a fresh mind. But continuing something just because you’ve been doing it long enough it’s a losing strategy.
Example. Despite many efforts and time measured in years, Ahrefs does not rank in “seo”.
Sad but true. And from our perspective, it’s disappointing. Almost like we’re the only ones not invited to the party, the only ones not graduating from high school… you get the idea.
But not ranking for ‘SEO’ hasn’t hindered our growth, so it’s better to cut our losses and deal with unfulfilled ambitions than to let this goal hold us back from other projects (like that programming project mentioned above) .
Confirmation bias is the tendency to give more attention and weight to data that supports one’s beliefs, while simultaneously rejecting or undervaluing evidence that contradicts those beliefs.
We are all guilty of this. It’s human nature. And it’s not all bad. I mean, in some cases, this tendency can keep us on the “good side” and help us get through tough times or keep us motivated.
So, I think it’s not something to get out of your system completely. Just be aware of situations where this can negatively affect your judgement:
- Selective elements in ranking factors. You see a page ranking highly and think it’s because of an aspect you strongly believe in, ignoring all the evidence against it (eg long-form content, social messaging).
- Keyword selection bias. Your keyword selection follows the lines of your beliefs about audience preferences without actual evidence to support those beliefs.
- Bias in strategy development. After you develop a new strategy, you come across a talk or article that advocates a similar approach, which immediately boosts your confidence in that strategy.
- Focus on confirmatory data during audits. During a content check, you find a small piece of data that confirms your belief. As a result, you can prioritize secondary findings over more important but less personally corroborating data.
- Overreliance on known tactics. By relying on SEO tactics that have worked in the past, you develop a sense of overconfidence in them. You resist trying anything new or the idea that the drop in performance is from an unknown factor.
Keep learning
If you like what you read, I think you’ll find other mental models fascinating:
Want to share models you find useful? Ping me X or LinkedIn.
