The Labour Illusion - show your working

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Hello, this is episode 91 of SEO is not that hard, and today's topic, the labor illusion, is inspired by some conversations we've been having internally at Keywords People Use. Now we've recently implemented our new SERP clustering. So so that's keyword clustering based upon the search engine results pages that show four different keywords and how they relate to each other. Now this has replaced our older, less sophisticated AI-based clustering. Now, the AI-based clustering used open AIs to create keyword clusters, but we discovered and could see, as we were using these clusters for more and more in-depth clustering, for a greater and greater number of terms, that it starts to fall down. It looks like it gives you good results to start with this AI clustering, but then after a while, you see that actually it doesn't, because it's guessing. Really, it's not really based on anything. It's not based on how people actually use the web. It's not based on how Google sees the web. It's not based on how web pages link together and how topical authority is built. It's just open AI having a good guess. Now this has led to a change in how we do the clustering. So our new clustering works, as I've said before, by looking at the urls that rank in google for every single keyword and then comparing every single keyword ranking urls together to find those keywords which have enough urls ranking together in common that we can see Google is clustering these keywords together and therefore, this is the content you need to build. You need to build content for each one of these clusters and that's based on information in Google, so it's much more valuable information. You're going to get much better clusters and you're going to have much more likelihood of positive results in the SERPs than just letting OpenAI have a guess for you.

Now, the thing here is that to do AI clustering takes seconds, but to do SERP clustering takes a lot longer for each keyword. So, for example, what might take literally seconds with it with AI, might take four or five minutes using circ clustering, and there's obviously a wait there, and waits aren't necessarily good for people if they're just sat there waiting for something to happen. Now, this process, when we do it, it works asynchronously, so you don't actually have to wait while the clustering is done. You'll get an email when a clustering is done so you can go do something else while the clustering is done. Now we get an email when a clustering is done so you can go do something else while a clustering is done. Now we believe it's worth the wait because you do get such better results that are based on an actual algorithm that's got value, that's tested, that gives you those results that you can take for and do something much better with.

But this difference in time is what gives us potentially a problem. So conventional wisdom kind of says that the longer people wait for something, the less satisfied they become, because people don't like waiting. But there's this thing called the labor illusion. It's a behavioral insight that's actually been tested. There is, there's harvard articles based on this where um people in and studied this effect. Now what the labor illusion says is, if you actually are transparent with people and tell them why they're having to wait and show them the work that's being done while they wait, then they actually start to attribute much more value to the results than if you could just give them those results instantaneously.

Now, an example of this we actually tested with Broadbannock Code UK many years ago. Now in Broadbannock Code UK the main way that it works is people give us a postcode that's the same as a zip code and they put that postcode in and then we'll search our database and find what deals are available in their area and make recommendations to them. Now this search process literally takes fractions of a second, because it's just one quick look up to what's available in a postcode area and then pulling from the database what those are, and it takes a fraction of a second. So we used to. To start with, you put your postcode in press search and bing straight away, you got your results in less than a second. Now this labor illusion was suggested to us that we might actually be able to convince people of a greater value if we just slowed the process down, gave them a little bit of information between them clicking search and then receiving the results as to what was going on and then showing them the results. So what you do now if you go there, she takes you to a little interstitial screen that says searching for deals with Sky for BT Broadband, and it sort of scrolls through the providers, tells you we're searching for deals in your postcode area and then it displays the results and this delay is maybe five or ten seconds. You know, it's not actually taking that long to perform the lookup, but we're just telling people, well, while we're doing this lookup, these are the steps we're taking and sort of mimicking it happening in real time, but really it's just sort of elongating that time frame just to tell them what's going on and then shows them results.

Now we split test this many years ago. So we showed, you know, half the people the instantaneous results and half the people the slowed down results, with this labor illusion in the middle, and we found that I think we run that we run it for about two months. I think it was a good long period we gave it. Over the time it became clear that people who saw the labor illusion and got the results slightly delayed, they actually were much more likely to convert to a sale than those who saw it instantaneously. And that's because we were demonstrating the value, we were telling them what we were actually doing and then, even though it slowed it down a bit. It made it seem more realistic that we were actually going to check in all these things which we were people not necessarily going to trust, stuff that happened straight away. Um, and it increased. It increased conversions by about 25 percent over the um, the original version. So we proved it then. So it's strange how it works.

But this Harvard report has exactly the same thing. They showed people instant results. They showed people delayed results with no explanation and they showed people delayed results with an explanation and the delayed results with the explanation performed best. Bizarrely, the delayed results without explanation still performed better than the delayed results without explanation still perform better than instantaneous results. So people actually seem to prefer websites which have longer waits than those that return instantaneous results if it's doing something that they believe to be complicated, anyway.

So this takes us back to what we're now discussing internally how to deal with this um, this gap now when people ask to cluster results from a, so people also ask search and how to explain why it's taking time. At the moment we've got a little um box that comes up and it just explains what we're doing, um, with a link to a video and you can close it and it tells you, you're going to get the, you're going to get an email when the clustering is done and to come back, and. But we've just been having a discussion whether we are actually even more transparent. Do we actually give like more real-time information of what's going on and do we try and explain it in more detail? And at the moment we haven't decided exactly what we're going to do.

But I just like to share that because this labor illusion concept has come up. I just thought it's a really interesting one to share on the podcast, because you may have a site where you are doing something like this, where you are searching for results for people or a tool that is carrying out a process, and it might just be worth considering putting in a labour illusion between people requesting something and then receiving it, which just explains what you're actually doing, because that explanation and that slight delay can actually improve people's perception of the value of what you're providing. It's certainly definitely one that is probably worth testing. If you've got e-commerce stuff or, again, any kind of affiliate site like broadmancouk, where you are performing a search, especially if it's a search of third-party services, just letting people know this is what you're doing could actually improve the perception of value and improve your sales, improve your conversion. So it's worth thinking about. So I hope that's useful.

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywords people use, that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

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