The Biggest SEO Myth

In this podcast, Meredith's husband shares a powerful story from Atomic Habits by James Clear, connecting it to the challenges of SEO. He recounts the story of the British cycling team, which, after decades of mediocrity, improved dramatically by focusing on small, incremental gains of 1% in all areas. These minor improvements accumulated, leading to significant success, including winning multiple Tour de France titles and Olympic gold medals.

Timestamps
[2:09] The new Performance Coach
[3:52] The result of 1% gains
[4:48] The Most Persistent SEO Myth
[5:35] How SEO actually works
[6:56] A Case Study
[8:03] Building SEO muscles
[9:03] Remember this... 
[9:52] You can't make good decisions with bad information

---
Meredith's Husband
https://www.meredithshusband.com

Episode Transcript

Meredith's husband (00:00):
Have you ever read the book Atomic Habits
?
No, have you?
I am reading it now.
Yes, and there's a story in itthat I Wish to share I really
liked.
Oh okay, I heard this storyfirst on a podcast.
James Clear, the guy who wroteAtomic Habits, was telling this
story on some other podcast.
Completely randomly, I startedreading the book and then heard

(00:21):
him tell the story again.
So the story is about theBritish cycling team.
Oh, yes, I love this one.
I actually told this to asmaller group you did and they
seemed to like it.
Yeah, it's great.
Now, I don't follow cycling, Idon't follow British cycling, I
know nothing about Britishcycling, but this story, I think
, is worth sharing.

(00:41):
Ok, and I don't know when thishappened, but I think it I don't
know, maybe in the 90s, let'ssay it was in the 90s, let's
just say for Schutzingales.
So the British cycling team andwe mean indoor, outdoor, like
all the competitive cyclers inBritain.
Yeah, did I say Brooklyn?
No, you said like Broughton, Imay have accidentally thrown a

(01:03):
Brooklyn in there, but theBritish cycling team, I don't
know about the Brooklyn team,but the British cycling team was
, I guess, just completelymediocre.
They had never won a worldchampionship.
They had never won a Tour deFrance.
I don't think they had ever wona gold medal at the Olympics.
They were just not great.
In fact, there, I guess, weresome bicycle manufacturing

(01:27):
companies that refused to selltheir bikes and their equipment
to the British Cycle becausethey didn't want their names on
a team that had that reputation.
Oh, they lost so much.
Well, I don't know if they lost, I don't know.
They were just never winners.
They weren't winners and theyhired again let's assume it was

(01:53):
the 1990s, yes, they hired aperformance coach, a they
weren't winners a rule of 1%gains.
He called it something a littlemore technical than that.
I don't remember what it was,but his philosophy was if we
take everything we do and wejust improve everything by 1%,
eventually we're going to just,we're going to win, we're going
to be a winning cycling team.

(02:14):
And so they started by doingthe stuff you would kind of
expect a cycling team to do.
They tested their tires andthey tested their track suits
versus.
You know, they wear differentsuits for indoors and outdoors.
They tested them against eachother.
They did all the standard stuff, but then, in addition, they
tested.
They literally testedeverything.

(02:34):
Remember, they're trying toimprove everything by 1%.
They did things like paint theinside of their truck you know
the truck that carries the bikesaround, where they do all the
repairs and stuff.
They painted the inside of thattruck all white so that if
there were dirt somewhere theywould see it more easily and
that way they would keep thebicycle equipment all as clean
as can be.

(02:54):
They did things like testdifferent pillows.
They sent all the riders homewith like 20 or 30 different
pillows and then they wouldreport on who gets the best
night's sleep with eachdifferent pillow and then they
would take those pillows on theroad.
I like buckwheat pillows withsilk pillowcases.
I think that's exactly the onethat they all chose, I don't

(03:15):
doubt it.
They brought in a surgeon toteach the writers how to wash
their hands so that they wouldget sick less frequently.
So they did all these thingsthat I guarantee you, nobody
else was doing.
So I guess somebody interviewedthe performance coach.
You know you think this isgoing to transform the British
cycling team into a winning team.
How long do you think it wouldtake?

(03:35):
And he said well, I think wecould.
If we do all these things andimplement them well, we could
win a Tour de France within fiveyears.
So I think it only took threeyears.
No, and they won the Tour deFrance.
No, and then they won the Tourde France the next five out of
six years.
No, they won the, I think, thenext world championship, I don't
remember.
At the next Olympics, they wonlike 70% of the gold medals.

(03:59):
They became a powerhouse, wow.
And it's not like they hiredall new, right?
Well, I don't know if theyhired new writers.
What they actually did?
Yeah, they fired all thewriters.
They actually hired all thebest writers and hired all the
good ones and, surprisingly,they won.
But this story reminds me verymuch of SEO.

(04:19):
Yeah, it reminds me of life ingeneral when I think about it.
It does.
It reminds me of life ingeneral when I think about it,
but especially SEO, because theone persistent misconception
that people have about SEO isthat there's going to be one
thing, there's something thatthey do.
A lot of times people come tome and they say, hey, my traffic
dropped off or my rankingsdropped off.
What is the one thing thathappened?

(04:40):
And occasionally that's true,yeah, but it's very rare Do they
also ask what's the one thing Ineed to do that's going to fix
this and get me to number onetomorrow.
All the time, all the time, Iwould ask that.
And even when they kind ofconceptually understand that
it's not just one thing, theactions that people do still

(05:02):
illustrate yeah they do expectsomething along the way to
catapult them to page one andthe way SEO works.
There is no one thing.
There are literally hundreds offactors ranking factors that
Google considers when theydetermine rankings, and that
changes too, doesn't it?
It changes, but, on the whole,the things that are important

(05:25):
are going to tend to be, they'regoing to continue to be,
important.
None of those things accountfor 50% of your rankings.
They're all 1%, 2%, maybe 3%,so it's very much the rule of 1%
gains.
You need to go through whenyou're doing SEO and just focus

(05:45):
on all the little things, putthe little things in order.
Yeah, that's a good visual,that's a good incentive.
And who said this?
James Clear, the guy who wrotewell, I mean, it's just a story
that he's telling about theBritish cycling team, and does
it have anything to do with him?
The guy who wrote Atomic HabitsWell, he has a pretty
interesting life.
Yeah, he had some disadvantagein high school.

(06:05):
He was a baseball player inhigh school and got hit, had a
terrible accident and had to,like, learn to, I think, walk
and do everything, Basically,become an infant and learn how
to do everything again.
And he did it by implementinghabits which he has now, you
know, illustrated in his book.

(06:25):
Yeah, it's a good book.
I do recommend it.
I mean, I've heard about thisbook for years.
One of my mentoring studentsactually just wrote to me last
week, yes, and said that shereached number one, page one,
for her most highly wishedkeyword, the keyword that she
really wanted to be on page onefor, and she now is.
She is not only on page one,she's number one and she's in a

(06:47):
very competitive market.
Yeah, and this was not theresult of doing one thing.
We had been working on thisover 12 months from when we
started and she was gettingliterally no organic traffic had
never, never, ever, gotten asingle lead from Google.
She is now number one, page onefor her most important keyword.

(07:07):
That's awesome.
And it wasn't Overnight, itwasn't one thing that she did,
it was several little thingsRight Over the course of a year.
Yeah, we had, you know, certainmilestones.
She hit page one for otherkeywords and she got her first
leads through Google fairlyquickly.
Now she gets I don't know whatpercentage, but a couple of
months ago it was like half andhalf.

(07:28):
Now she's on page one, numberone.
I assume it's better.
Anyway, if you're listening,congratulations.
I was very happy.
I was very proud of her.
This also reminded me you justsaid to me recently that you had
never felt like you've beenstrong physically.
You're not a strong, musclyperson.
That made me think of this also.

(07:49):
Like if you lift weights,you're going to get stronger.
Like you feel that you havenever been strong.
You've never lifted weights,you've never done resistance
training.
If you lift weights, you'regoing to get stronger.
If you do SEO stuff, your SEOis going to get better.
Yes, you don't go to the gymand lift a really heavy weight
one time and then you're strong,you're done Forever.

(08:11):
That's not the way it works.
But I don't think I have everever in my professional career,
I have never seen any company orperson put serious effort into
SEO and have it not pay off,like if you're serious.
Like I've seen people go to thegym once and say I'm going to
do SEO this week and then at theend of the week, they're not on

(08:32):
page one.
They're like well, seo doesn'twork.
That's a very good comparison.
But my message is, when you'redoing SEO, just keep in mind
that everything you're doing,every one thing, is like a 1%
gain, or perhaps a less than a1% gain.
You're not going to do one ofthose things and then go check
Google and see you're on thefirst page of Google.

(08:53):
Also, just FYI, don't do that.
Don't go to Google and do asearch and look for you.
That's not how you do that.
Please do not do it that way.
Use Google Search Console andlook at what it reports your
rankings and impressions to be.
Don't go do your search on yourown period.
It's like looking at the scaleif you want to lose or gain
weight every single day orthroughout the day.
No, that's not at all what itis.

(09:15):
Not at all.
We have talked about that andwe will probably talk about that
in the future.
But there are many reasons whyyou don't want to do that.
Yes, it's not just you probablyalso will obsess over it, but
you're going to be getting badinformation if you do that.
There you go.
You're guaranteed you're goingto get bad information and you
can't make good decisions withbad information.

(09:37):
Okay, right there, mic drop.
Okay, the thing I was going tosay, as I was waiting for you
and I was just talking.
I was talking about habits, yes, and then I wondered aloud do
hobbits have habits?
The next time I went to myphone, it was suggesting
something from Lord of the Ringsto me.
Oh, come on, you can't.
What was it?
You can't get good information,you can't make good decisions

(10:00):
with bad information.
Is that what you said?
That is actually almost what Isaid.
Hey, now, yeah, there's a 1%change for the better, it's a 1%
gain.