99% of SEOs are in dire need of a Second Brain
In this article, I’ll take you through the key concepts to master when building an SEO second brain.
Whether you are an in-house SEO or working at a digital agency, I can bet money that you’ve encountered at least one of the following problems:
- Information overload: You’re struggling to keep up with the latest trends in the industry, whether they are ‘Zero Search Volume (ZSV)’ keywords, innovative link-building strategies, or Google’s latest algorithm updates.
- Potato syndrome: You’re in a meeting with clients/executives who are challenging your input, and for some bizarre reason, your brain potatoes out and you struggle to find the proper documentation to support your recommendations in the midst of the meeting.
- Never-ending setups: Every time you start working on a new website, you spend days and weeks setting up deliverable trackers, audit sheets, keyword map templates, content briefings, and development backlog grooming each time you start working on a new website.
Me too, and at one point, I knew something had to change if I wanted to keep growing as an SEO. This was when I discovered the concept of building a second brain.
In this article, I’ll take you through the key concepts to master when building an SEO second brain.
Why would I even want to build an SEO second brain?
When building a second brain, it’s important to first understand what our brains are great at, and what they’re not so good at. So here’s a summary:
Our brains are good at:
- Coming up with new ideas
- Interlinking ideas and creating persuasive, captivating narratives
- Building empathy with others
Our brains are not good at:
- Storing information in the long-term
- Segmenting and categorising stored information
- Searching and bringing up stored information for usage
Second brains are built precisely to address these weaknesses of our biological brains, and when you’re an SEO, having a second brain at the tip of your fingers at all times can be a life-saver.
Which platform should I use to build an SEO second brain?
There are a plethora of systems and platforms you can use to build a second brain. At the end of the day, it all comes down to your preference and which platform you’re most comfortable with. I personally use Notion to build my SEO second brain, so I’ll be using examples from Notion throughout this article.
Popular platforms to build a second brain:
Getting your SEO second brain right the first time
These are the three most important principles to keep in mind when building a second brain.
Centralisation
Firstly, build out a clearly defined structure in your Second Brain. This helps you achieve two main things:
- It forces you to segment and categorises all your information from the get-go, which helps you better make sense of all the chaos that happens within the life of an SEO.
- It gives you a high-level overview of all your information, helping you easily access them when needed.
Here’s an example of how I structure my SEO Second Brain in Notion.
Idea Capturing Station
Secondly, you need to build a bridge that connects your Second Brain with your biological one. This is what I call an idea capturing station. In short, this is a place where you can:
- Quickly note down quick ideas that you’ve had
- Copy and paste links from articles you’ve read
- Drop in screenshots from your phone
- Add meeting recordings throughout the day
- and more
From here, you can make a weekly schedule to look at the ideas you’ve captured throughout the week and organise them into your Second Brain.
Here’s an example:
I’ve read this fascinating article by Steve Toff about Zero Search Volume (ZSV) keywords. After reading the article, I quickly copied the link and pasted it into the Media folder of my idea capturing station.
At the end of the week, I reviewed my station and decided to move this article to my Keyword Research Knowledge Hub for future reference. From here, I can start creating my own processes for capturing ZSVs and build a template for it in the templates section. Finally, when appropriate, I can bring out this template and use it on any of my SEO projects.
Capturing is actually part of a much bigger process laid out by Tiago Forte, a thought leader in the productivity and note-taking space. You can check out this framework overview here.
Templatisation
Finally, templatisation isn’t something new to most SEOs. Many of us pride ourselves in our templates, whether they are for technical audits, keyword research processes, competitive analysis, checklists to diagnose an algorithmic penalty, or writers’ briefs.
This is how having a second brain can take things one step further:
- Speed: I have personally found it to be much faster to retrieve and use templates to scale work when they’re stored in my second brain. The system’s searchability allows me to quickly pull up all needed templates at once and mass replicate them whenever I start working on a new website.
- Shareability: Organising your templates in a second brain means that you’re naturally building a knowledge hub for yourself, and potentially others as well. This can be beneficial to you in many ways, whether to strengthen your personal brand or build a better relationship with your clients and coworkers.
- Recoverability: Any good SEO template needs to be adjusted over time. Whether to adapt to newer trends or to accommodate specific business use-cases with different websites or clients. Having a second brain allows you to build historically sensitive databases, letting you recover older versions of your templates that may have been lost otherwise when they become useful again.
How to best use your SEO second brain
Here are three tips from my experience on how to best use your SEO second brain.
Keep only what resonates
When building a second brain, it can be tempting to mass import all your existing documents into your platform of choice. But the reality is that you’ll most likely only use 10 to 20% of all the data you end up storing.
Instead, I’d strongly urge anyone building a second brain to start from scratch and only import documents from your existing storage systems in small chunks. Most importantly, don’t be afraid to chuck out information that does not resonate with you.
This helps keep your database clean and filled with useful information.
Summarise generously
This tip applies especially to the knowledge hub section of your SEO second brain. Most personal knowledge hubs are left unused simply because each piece of information is too long and dense.
This disincentivizes you from revisiting your notes to recapture your knowledge and use them in your everyday job.
For this reason, don’t be afraid of leaving out details in your summaries. I tend to water down each piece of article I’ve read into a single sentence, leaving only one chosen key takeaway for me to refer back to in the future.
Along with this, I leave a reference back to the original article so that if I’d like to revisit the piece of information in greater depth, I can simply reread the original article again.
Organise one bit at a time
Building an SEO second brain can be overwhelming. Naturally, the more experience you have, the larger you’d want your second brain to be.
Instead of trying to finish creating your second brain from scratch in one day (trust me, it’ll take a bit longer than that), start by creating only a single section that you’ll find the most useful.
Are you looking to revamp your SEO template gallery to use on upcoming projects? Start with your template section in the second brain! Are your colleagues asking you for reading tips on learning SEO as a beginner? Start with your knowledge hub instead.
Learn more about building a second brain
If you have any questions about building an SEO second brain, feel free to drop me a message via the contact form or through LinkedIn :)