Meredith's husband: 0:24

Have you ever read the book Atomic Habits? No, have you? I am reading it now. Yes, and there's a story in it that I Wish to share I really liked. Oh okay, I heard this story first on a podcast. James Clear, the guy who wrote Atomic Habits, was telling this story on some other podcast. Completely randomly, I started reading the book and then heard him tell the story again. So the story is about the British cycling team. Oh, yes, I love this one. I actually told this to a smaller group you did and they seemed to like it. Yeah, it's great.

Meredith's husband: 0:57

Now, I don't follow cycling, I don't follow British cycling, I know nothing about British cycling, but this story, I think, is worth sharing. Ok, and I don't know when this happened, but I think it I don't know, maybe in the 90s, let's say it was in the 90s, let's just say for Schutzingales. So the British cycling team and we mean indoor, outdoor, like all the competitive cyclers in Britain. Yeah, did I say Brooklyn? No, you said like Broughton, I may have accidentally thrown a Brooklyn in there, but the British cycling team, I don't know about the Brooklyn team, but the British cycling team was, I guess, just completely mediocre. They had never won a world championship. They had never won a Tour de France. I don't think they had ever won a gold medal at the Olympics. They were just not great. In fact, there, I guess, were some bicycle manufacturing companies that refused to sell their bikes and their equipment to the British Cycle because they 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 they hired again let's assume it was the 1990s, yes, they hired a performance coach, a they weren't winners a rule of 1% gains. He called it something a little more technical than that. I don't remember what it was, but his philosophy was if we take everything we do and we just improve everything by 1%, eventually we're going to just, we're going to win, we're going to be a winning cycling team. And so they started by doing the stuff you would kind of expect a cycling team to do. They tested their tires and they tested their track suits versus. You know, they wear different suits for indoors and outdoors. They tested them against each other. They did all the standard stuff, but then, in addition, they tested. They literally tested everything. Remember, they're trying to improve everything by 1%.

Meredith's husband: 3:01

They did things like paint the inside of their truck you know the truck that carries the bikes around, where they do all the repairs and stuff. They painted the inside of that truck all white so that if there were dirt somewhere they would see it more easily and that way they would keep the bicycle equipment all as clean as can be. They did things like test different pillows. They sent all the riders home with like 20 or 30 different pillows and then they would report on who gets the best night's sleep with each different pillow and then they would take those pillows on the road. I like buckwheat pillows with silk pillowcases. I think that's exactly the one that they all chose, I don't doubt it. They brought in a surgeon to teach the writers how to wash their hands so that they would get sick less frequently. So they did all these things that I guarantee you, nobody else was doing.

Meredith's husband: 3:51

So I guess somebody interviewed the performance coach. You know you think this is going to transform the British cycling team into a winning team. How long do you think it would take? And he said well, I think we could. If we do all these things and implement them well, we could win a Tour de France within five years. So I think it only took three years. No, and they won the Tour de France. No, and then they won the Tour de France the next five out of six years. No, they won the, I think, the next world championship, I don't remember. At the next Olympics, they won like 70% of the gold medals. They became a powerhouse, wow. And it's not like they hired all new, right? Well, I don't know if they hired new writers. What they actually did? Yeah, they fired all the writers. They actually hired all the best writers and hired all the good ones and, surprisingly, they won.

Meredith's husband: 4:39

But this story reminds me very much of SEO. Yeah, it reminds me of life in general when I think about it. It does. It reminds me of life in general when I think about it, but especially SEO, because the one persistent misconception that people have about SEO is that there's going to be one thing, there's something that they do. A lot of times people come to me and they say, hey, my traffic dropped off or my rankings dropped off. What is the one thing that happened? And occasionally that's true, yeah, but it's very rare Do they also ask what's the one thing I need to do that's going to fix this and get me to number one tomorrow. All the time, all the time, I would ask that. And even when they kind of conceptually understand that it's not just one thing, the actions that people do still illustrate yeah they do expect something along the way to catapult them to page one and the way SEO works. There is no one thing. There are literally hundreds of factors ranking factors that Google considers when they determine rankings, and that changes too, doesn't it? It changes, but, on the whole, the things that are important are going to tend to be, they're going to continue to be, important. None of those things account for 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 when you're doing SEO and just focus on all the little things, put the little things in order. Yeah, that's a good visual, that's a good incentive.

Meredith's husband: 6:16

And who said this? James Clear, the guy who wrote well, I mean, it's just a story that he's telling about the British cycling team, and does it have anything to do with him? The guy who wrote Atomic Habits Well, he has a pretty interesting life. Yeah, he had some disadvantage in high school. He was a baseball player in high 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 implementing habits which he has now, you know, illustrated in his book. Yeah, it's a good book. I do recommend it. I mean, I've heard about this book for years.

Meredith's husband: 6:55

One of my mentoring students actually just wrote to me last week, yes, and said that she reached number one, page one, for her most highly wished keyword, the keyword that she really wanted to be on page one for, and she now is. She is not only on page one, she's number one and she's in a very competitive market. Yeah, and this was not the result of doing one thing. We had been working on this over 12 months from when we started and she was getting literally no organic traffic had never, never, ever, gotten a single lead from Google. She is now number one, page one for her most important keyword. That's awesome. And it wasn't Overnight, it wasn't one thing that she did, it was several little things Right Over the course of a year. Yeah, we had, you know, certain milestones. She hit page one for other keywords and she got her first leads through Google fairly quickly. Now she gets I don't know what percentage, but a couple of months ago it was like half and half. Now she's on page one, number one. I assume it's better. Anyway, if you're listening, congratulations. I was very happy. I was very proud of her.

Meredith's husband: 8:01

This also reminded me you just said to me recently that you had never felt like you've been strong physically. You're not a strong, muscly person. That made me think of this also. Like if you lift weights, you're going to get stronger. Like you feel that you have never been strong. You've never lifted weights, you've never done resistance training. If you lift weights, you're going to get stronger. If you do SEO stuff, your SEO is going to get better. Yes, you don't go to the gym and lift a really heavy weight one time and then you're strong, you're done Forever. That's not the way it works. But I don't think I have ever ever in my professional career, I have never seen any company or person put serious effort into SEO and have it not pay off, like if you're serious. Like I've seen people go to the gym once and say I'm going to do SEO this week and then at the end of the week, they're not on page one. They're like well, seo doesn't work. That's a very good comparison.

Meredith's husband: 9:02

But my message is, when you're doing SEO, just keep in mind that everything you're doing, every one thing, is like a 1% gain, or perhaps a less than a 1% gain. You're not going to do one of those things and then go check Google and see you're on the first page of Google. Also, just FYI, don't do that. Don't go to Google and do a search and look for you. That's not how you do that. Please do not do it that way. Use Google Search Console and look at what it reports your rankings and impressions to be. Don't go do your search on your own period. It's like looking at the scale if you want to lose or gain weight every single day or throughout the day. No, that's not at all what it is. Not at all. We have talked about that and we will probably talk about that in the future.

Meredith's husband: 9:44

But there are many reasons why you don't want to do that. Yes, it's not just you probably also will obsess over it, but you're going to be getting bad information if you do that. There you go. You're guaranteed you're going to get bad information and you can't make good decisions with bad information. Okay, right there, mic drop. Okay, the thing I was going to say, 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 my phone, it was suggesting something from Lord of the Rings to me. Oh, come on, you can't. What was it? You can't get good information, you can't make good decisions with bad information. Is that what you said? That is actually almost what I said. Hey, now, yeah, there's a 1% change for the better, it's a 1% gain.