Thinking models to escape from analysis paralysis: An SEO's use case

Introduction

SEOs are relied upon by their clients, bosses and colleagues to make decisions and recommendations to drive organic growth. Often times, there are no rights or wrongs in these decisions, and over-researching your recommendation can lead to analysis paralysis.

Here are some examples of hard SEO decisions you have have encountered:

• Scenario A: You’re responsible for driving organic growth for 5 websites, but you only have the resources to achieve any meaningful results for 2.
• Scenario B: You’re far from achieving your set KPI and you need to make an assessment on whether to spend your remaining annual budget on a content push or link building.
• Scenario C: A website you’re working on suddenly lost 50% of it’s 1st page rankings over night. You can either spend time doing a deep dive into it’s causes or start implementing fixes based on the most likely hypothesis right away.

In these cases, we need to either back our recommendation with past experience or official documentation on so called best practices.

In this article, I’ll lay out two thinking models I use on a daily basis to quantify the way I make difficult SEO decisions.

Hard choice model

In this model, you put forward these two factors when faced with a difficult decision:

• How impactful it is
• How easy it is to compare the options

Putting these factors into tables, it looks like this:

Categorising goals in this way helps you escape from analysis paralysis if the decision you need to make falls into the Apples/Organges, No-brainer or Big Choice categories.

However, if you find that your decision falls into the hard choice category, I use the following thinking model to find the best option to move forward with.

Implement a scoring system

Here, I start by identifying the different factors I’d like to take into consideration and start scoring them one by one.

Finally the option with the highest aggregated score is the winner.

Applying the hard choice model and scoring system on an actual difficult SEO decision

Let’s take scenario A as an example: You’re responsible for driving organic growth for 5 websites, but you only have the resources to achieve any meaningful results for 2.

Choosing between the 5 website is clearly a high impact decision. Choosing incorrectly can lead you to miss your KPI, ignoring a website that would otherwise achieve significant growth.

Let’s assume that the 5 websites each have their own strengths and weaknesses, making them difficult to compare.

This puts your decision in the hard choice category.

From here, you can apply a scoring system to weigh based on different factors such as technical limitations, revenue forecast and stakeholder buying.

In this scenario, the website to focus your resources on would be the two with the highest score: B and C.

Test-running

The usefulness of these thinking models will depend on your personal preference. Make sure you test out these thinking models on a few scenarios to see if it works for you!