Feedback Loops & SEO

What does the Brazilian soccer game of futsol have to do with Google Analytics data?

How is your bathtub a system just like the flow of traffic in and out of your website?

In the book Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows, she illustrates a fundamental concept of how systems work – in the natural and human world.

The book moves on to explain the role of feedback loops in the system, and this is a key concept that’s especially troubling in SEO work. We’ll touch on why it’s so frustrating in SEO and what we can do about it later on, but the concept of systems and feedback loops are critical to learning, adjusting, implementing, and improving the traffic-generation systems that we supercharge with our SEO skills.

To build consistent growth we need to constantly learn and innovate on tactics. By ”learn”, we don’t mean the broad concept of learning in an elementary school sense, but more along the lines of how machine learning works. Taking a variety of inputs and learning from them over time and volume to create satisfactory outputs.

In A Mind for Numbers, Barbara Oakley talks about the concept of chunks as building blocks for knowledge. You must learn the foundational concepts to build chunks of knowledge to then apply those learnings in a creative way. Without the foundational learning we obtain by reading Google Analytics, for example, you don’t have the atomic bits to be more creative in

In The Talent Code, author highlights the importance of feedback loops for learning and the different types. With quicker, more rapid feedback you adjust and iterate your activity to get closer to the desired result.

When working on SEO projects, it often takes 3-6 months to see convincing results. This feedback loop is really long for humans to endure, and hence why so many get frustrated in the process.

The solution? Track better KPIs that will eventually lead to the results you want and allow you to see metrics earlier on.

Or better yet, use AdWords and quicker channels to get quicker feedback loops until you believe so strongly in the work that you don’t need to rely on the loops anymore.