Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfewplayerscom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and then how to optimize your content to build traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello, welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as usual, and today we're going to talk about Goodhart's Law.

Speaker 1: 1:23

Now, this is something that's come from the world of economics, but it has many implications across a whole variety of areas, including SEO. So if you've never heard what Goodhart's Law is, don't worry, I'm going to go through it, and you'm going to go through it and you're going to find how it can actually be more relevant to your SEO strategy than you might think. So, in short, goodhart's Law says when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure. So what does that really mean and how can it impact the way we look at optimising websites or running any kind of online business? So let's have a look. So, first of all, let's break down what goodheart's law actually is so in simpler terms, it comes from an economic economist called charles goodheart and he observed that once people know a certain metric will be used to evaluate them, then they'll focus on gaming or manipulating that metric, sometimes to the detriment of what the actual real underlying goals are of whoever set that metric as a measure. So in the context of SEO, this could mean fixating on a single sort of KPI, a key performance indicators such as keyword rankings, backlinks or organic traffic, and losing sight of the bigger picture like user experience, conversions, brand reputation, that kind of thing. Yeah, a classic example of good arts law that's often given in.

Speaker 1: 2:50

This isn't an seo example, but it will hopefully explain a bit more if it's still not quite clear. So imagine you've got a call center and the bosses at the call center only measure their agents the people handling the calls are the length of the call that those agents spend the average length of call. So agents are now motivated to get those calls finished as quickly as possible, which means that the agents are going to start rushing their calls to keep them short, which isn't necessarily going to be great for the customers. The customers can end up unhappy because their issues don't necessarily always get fully resolved. So look at it from SEO-wise If you only focus on page rankings, you might forget whether you're actually converting visitors. So the key sort of takeaway here is that when you place too much emphasis on one metric, you risk distorting your overall strategy. So that's, that's good hearts law, like in a nutshell.

Speaker 1: 3:48

So let's think about some other reasons. You know where you could go wrong here in seo by focusing on the wrong thing. So an example from back in the day would be keyword stuffing, back when, um, you know, search engines were really much more focused on what's on page rather than other metrics like backlinks and user engagement and things like that. You know, basically, people used to stuff keywords into web pages, right, and they did this to boost their rankings, but the converse side of it was it made that content really poor and unreadable for actual humans. And eventually, you know the search engines they got wise to this and they started to penalize it.

Speaker 1: 4:27

A second room, second one backlinks. Okay, people chasing backlinks at all costs. Now this we know. Backlinks are important for seo I'm not going to say that they're not and it is a key metric for improving your sort of domain standing with the search engines. But if you just start chasing links without thinking about the quality of those links, you start doing things like buying links using link farms, you end up with poor quality backlinks and you can actually end up even getting penalized for this. So example you know, back in the day before penguin, you know it was a lot more prevalent. I used to do it myself buy a lot of backlinks, use a lot of spammy backlinks. We were just going for quantity of backlinks, not thinking about the quality. Google comes along, implements penguin, update bosh. We are completely hit and wiped out and and this still happens now. People concentrate on backlinks at all costs without thinking about quality, where they're coming from, do lots of shady link building tactics and eventually works in the short term. Eventually you will get wiped out.

Speaker 1: 5:30

Some people obsess over domain authority, the domain authority or domain rating that you get from places like Mars and from a hrefs and places like that. They. They are interesting metric For comparing the relative importance of websites, but they're only a metric from a third party. They're not. It's not a metric used by google. There is some correlation the higher the da generally, the better a site is likely to be doing in the search, but it's not guaranteed okay, and some people just get so focused on increasing their da or the dr the expense of anything else that they they just end up trading links with irrelevant sites just to boost those, and again it can lead to messy link profiles and and and they can link end up leading to penalization. So, while it's interesting, it shouldn't be your key, key metric that you're focusing on.

Speaker 1: 6:22

Another one that some, sometimes people look at is click-through manipulation. Um, so look, focusing incredibly closely on their click-through rates, and this might be click-through manipulation in real black hat terms, by using proxies to simulate clicks and simulate engagement on site. Or it could be by trying to write titles that encourage people to click but that doesn't necessarily work out for those people when they land on your page. So this is where the click-through rate in isolation, without thinking about the user engagement on the other side, can lead you to problems, because with poor user engagement, that could lead to issues further down the line. So what's the impact?

Speaker 1: 7:01

If you are spending time looking at the wrong metrics, looking at the wrong targets, a victim of good hearts law well, you're going to waste resources. You know you might if you're spending time and money chasing a single kpi. For example, say you're cranking out blog posts like crazy, trying to hit some kind of blog frequency target you set yourself. If you ignore the content, quality, user engagement, conversion, those kind of things you're going to end up with worse content. You're going to lower the value of the content on your site. You're going to end up with user dissatisfaction If you're not delivering real value to your users, giving them what they actually want.

Speaker 1: 7:41

Say you focus solely on speed. It's important to have a fast website, but you've still got to have good content as well. If the content and the design is awkward or the content is irrelevant, then people are going to click away, which again this sends a negative signal to google that your site isn't meeting people's needs. You're going to risk penalties. Okay, over optimizing for particularly things like links and some other areas like that. You're going to end up potentially pushing yourself into areas where you go straight from white hat to grey hat into black hat and at a certain point you know you risk getting hit with penalties and you can become strategically blind. You know, if your culture of your company and your website is revolves around one single metric, you're going to miss bigger opportunities and you're going to fail to adapt when algorithms change. So let's think about how to mitigate good hearts law okay, especially in seo. So, as I said, a lot of the metrics we've talked about in isolation aren't necessarily that bad, you know it's if they become the full focus, that it's that it's a big issue.

Speaker 1: 8:45

So what you need to do is, instead of focusing on just one thing, instead of just focusing on page rank or just traffic or um, or just organic traffic or engagement, you need to have a basket of key performance indicators for your site. So you want to sort of look at organic traffic yeah, it's important. Look at on-page engagement things like time, on page bounce rate, that kind of thing of thing Look at conversions, look at return visits and look at revenue per visitor. If you see one performing badly at the expense of the others, then that's when you start to realise that your focus is going in the wrong area. You need to keep a balance. It will mean compromises in certain areas. It may mean compromising the level of organic traffic you have if conversion is more important. But obviously, at the end of the day, your website needs to make money, your business needs to make money, so you've got to concentrate on that, that bottom line, emphasize sort of user-centric goals.

Speaker 1: 9:41

So put yourself in your visitor's shoes. You know what's the experience like. Do people find information they need quickly? Is your site easy to navigate on mobile? If you know you know your site inside out better than anyone else and if you've got a frustration that you know about your site even though you know your site inside out, how much more likely is that to be a frustration for your users, for example? So think about putting yourselves in your user's shoes. Especially people come into as a site the first time without knowing anything.

Speaker 1: 10:09

Regularly, regularly sort of reassess what your targets are. So changes quickly. Your business focus might change. You know these. Your targets can be very different in the early days as they are in the latter days. Obviously, most sites in the early days are going to focus more on gaining organic traffic, because revenue is the wrong target, because you know without any traffic you're not going to have any revenue. But as your business, your website, matures, you're going to start looking more into, for example, revenues becomes more important than pure organic traffic numbers and that's where you're potentially going to look at things like conversion rates. So always assess what you, what the targets you have, whether they're the right ones for the, for the life cycle of your business.

Speaker 1: 10:49

Always, always, think of quality over quantity. You know, from content to backlinks. Always ask yourself is this high quality, does it make sense to my audience, does it reflect well on my brand? And if the answer is no, then you might be veering into the good hearts law danger zone. Finally, always stay educated on best practices. So SEO, as you know, it's ever evolving, so you need to keep learning about algorithm updates. You need to read SEO blogs, network with other SEOs, listen to podcasts like this one, listen to other podcasts. You know, keeping on top of things will help you spot the difference between a good metric and a meaningless one.

Speaker 1: 11:27

So that's it for today. I know it wasn't a pure SEO one. I know it is more behavioral economics in that one, but it is an important one to think about because, hopefully, as I've demonstrated, there are plenty of SEO pitfalls you can fall into and become a victim of Goodhart's Law, because it doesn't just apply in one area. It applies to us as equally as it does to call centres and other areas or other organisations which track metrics and end up tracking them to a single metric to the detriment of others. So, yeah, hopefully you found it useful, hopefully it's given you something to think about your business, your websites and, yeah, if you've got any questions, any thoughts, do get in touch. Love to hear from you and until next time, keep optimising, stay curious and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: 12:19

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mention here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, that Ed is spelled with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Just search for Ed Dawson on both.

Speaker 1: 12:34

You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform, keywords People Use at keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online. Pus those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And, finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimise and continually refine your content Targeted, personalised advice to keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwwEdDawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.