Dealing with your own EGO as an SEO: Three most common logical fallacies

SEOs have to wrestle with their own ego on a daily basis

As SEOs, we often find ourselves as the only organic growth expert in a team or even organisation. Combined with a few years of experience and a handful of successful projects, this can unknowingly inflate our ego.

This inflated ego can make us unintentionally ignorant, leading us to make logical fallacies in our decision-making and end up with an SEO disaster that could’ve easily been prevented.

I have to admit that this is something I’ve struggled with at times, especially when there aren’t any other SEOs around. I’ve found that a great way to tackle this ego problem is by learning to spot your own logical fallacies.

In this article, I’ll go through the three most common logical fallacies SEOs make, resulting from our position of expertise.

Confirmation bias: As an ex-writer, we’re not ranking because our content sucks!

As humans, we have a natural bias to seek evidence that confirms what we already believe. This is a well-studied phenomenon known as “confirmation bias.” But in a field where there is always incomplete data, conflicting evidence and no clear right/wrong, confirmation bias runs rampant among SEOs.

Defaulting to your strength without a proper diagnosis

Here are two example some of us may find ourselves in.

• John used to be a journalist for 15+ years, before transitioning to SEO. He finds himself with the tendency to advocate for a big content push whenever a website he manages is experiencing a traffic drop. He quickly does a content gap analysis to point out missing article topics on the website to justify his strategy.
• Michelle was a developer before transitioning to become a technical SEO director at a big tech company. She’s developed an custom site audit programme to help her diagnose technical SEO issues, but her colleagues are starting question whether there are easier ways to fix minor issues like title tag adjustments. She easily justifies her approach by saying that her bespoke software will eventually spot the missing title tags that need to be fixed.

In both John and Michelle’s case, they were convinced what needed to be done and perhaps unintentionally, they only selected evidence that would justify their claims instead of launching a proper investigation.

If your background is in content, it’s important to start questioning whether simply creating more content is going to solve your current SEO issues in a meaningful, scalable way.

Like I usually explain to clients, simply adding more water into a leaking barrel is not going to cut it. Instead, you may need to start content pruning or building new features with a product-led SEO approach.

Reducing our confirmation bias in SEO

Personally, I try to avoid my own confirmation bias by developing a habit of storing ‘surprising’ pieces of information in my SEO second brain. When I find a piece of information that is surprising or counter to what I believe, I store that piece of information in my second brain for future reference.

By saving ideas that don’t necessary support what we already believe, we can train ourselves to become more open-minded, properly evaluating each credible piece of evidence before jumping straight to conclusions.

Creating a false dichotomy: If we don’t redirect these URLs, our SEO strategy will 100% fail!

When we’re faced with a pressing issues (like a site migration disaster), we can easily fall into the trap of creating a false dichotomy for ourselves.

Formally, this is when:

Here’s an example.

False dichotomy in a site migration

Let’s say Marry, an SEO consultant has to quickly resolve an e-commerce store site migration disaster, where a website lost 80% of it’s traffic 1 week after the migrating to a new domain.

After investigating the issue, Marry is led to believe that there has been some redirection errors, where all paginated URLs and some older blogs were not redirected properly to the new website.

With her years of experience, she quickly concludes that if proper redirects are not implemented on these pages, the lost traffic cannot recover. The dichotomy here is such that:

Due to lack of development resources, Marry’s request to implement the redirects were pushed to the next quarter and she sadly concludes that her KPIs will definitely not be met this year.

But what if there are other ways around this. What if the new website had a more flexible CMS create more engaging content, a more intuitive site structure to better prioritise pages, or an opportunity to do a brand push and build valuable backlinks?

When our ego and past experience gets in the way, it can create a mental block that stops us from exploring real alternative solutions to our SEO problems.

Preventing false dichotomies in SEO

The scary thing about this fallacy is that it often happens without us knowing it. Oftentimes, we find ourselves utterly convinced that there are only one or two viable solutions in SEO, putting ourselves in an unnecessary do-or-die situation.

For me, adopting a better thinking model when faced with difficult SEO decisions has been key to helping me prevent these false dichotomies from occurring. For instance, applying a scoring system to decision making forces me to spend time brainstorming solutions can train us not to hastily jump to conclusions even when the answer seems obvious.

Ignoring Occam’s Razor: It can’t be the user experience, we need another technical audit!

Many SEOs with a technical background have a tendency to give complex diagnoses to problems when there are simpler ones out there.

This is where learning to apply the rule of Occam’s razor can help. Also known as the Law of Parsimony, rule states:

This principle of logic is widely used in the scientific method, computer science, law and yet, it’s something I see SEOs ignoring all the time.

Not every drop in traffic or organic conversions warrants an in-depth technical audit. Sometimes, a simple answer lies in front of us.

Building better relationships

A great way to avoid giving overly complex SEO diagnoses is to form better relationships with our colleagues in other departments or teams. This is so that when a design or content change occurs, we can factor them into our analysis without always requiring the full might of crawlers like Screaming Frog.

Becoming a more mindful SEO

When you start to pay attention to these logical fallacies, you’ll notice that they happen in the workplace all the time, and definitely not just within the realm of SEO.

My hypothesis is that these three logical fallacies occur when we become over-confident, misguiding us to assume we know the solution to a given problem without proper investigation.

I’ve found that by adopting healthier knowledge management systems and thinking models, we can train ourselves to better spot these fallacies and prevent them from affecting our decision-making on a daily basis.

Hope you found this interesting and helpful!