
Last Updated on October 29, 2024
Everyone wants the easy win—the quick, low-effort path to success. But here’s the catch: easy is crowded. We also know that shortcuts often come with sharp crashes or side effects.
The real opportunities, the ones that set you apart, are in solving hard problems. These are the challenges that others avoid because they seem too difficult, unpredictable, or impossible to measure.
At Omniscient, we deliberately choose hard problems – specifically, the problems that we have a unique comparative advantage in solving. Why? Because it’s how you create a lasting competitive edge.
Today, I want to share why this approach works and how it can drive meaningful growth in SEO, content strategy, and beyond.
Easy goals are more competitive, and thus harder to win
The first argument is simple: the barrier to entry is lower with the easy stuff, so the level of competition is higher.
We often see this illustrated through marketers’ recent denigration of the “Old SEO Playbook,” which goes like this:
Identify top organic competitors and run a content gap analysis. Sort by highest search volume. Copy format of currently ranking posts and optimize using Clearscope, Surfer, or MarketMuse. Possibly write with AI or a freelancer who has no industry experience. Rinse and repeat.
While I have my doubts that this was ever a universal “playbook,” certainly the downside of running a program like this is that, well, everybody else can do the exact same thing with little effort.
It only wins when you already have a distinct advantage, such as a very powerful domain or brand authority. But even HubSpot is now walking back into the benefits of writing content based on experience and expertise.
What’s hard?
Deeply understanding your audience and their idiosyncrasies through a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and building an audience-centric SEO program/product.
Then, and only then, applying a layer of SEO research to quantify opportunity size and stack rank priorities.
It’s the difference between creating a value-centered program that solves prospects problems and pain points versus merely copying competitors to get a quick hit of traffic.
More:
- What’s easy in link building? Mass spamming blogs for link inclusions, and possibly paying for link insertions. What’s hard? Creating original research or content that is worth linking to, and then using outreach and relationships to accelerate placements.
- What’s easy in content creation? Automating it with ChatGPT. What’s hard? Writing about things you have deep technical expertise in or interviewing those who have expertise and centering the content on hard to fake knowledge.
- What’s easy in technical SEO? Audit in Ahrefs, send client list of 1000 issues. What’s harder is to figure out which of the 5% will actually move the needle and to ignore the small fires that don’t actually matter (and to actually implement/execute on them).
In our own business, we often take on clients with very technical subject matter or in complex industries that most shy away from. Sometimes, we wrestle with chaotic and opaque internal organization structures that make it politically difficult to execute on strategies. We take these on because, by nature of their difficulty, we become extra valuable.
Here’s a frivolous analogy: it’s easy to memorize a pickup line, it’s harder to become someone worth dating. But if you focus on the latter, any and all tactics (like pickup lines or silly clothes) will become easier and more effective.
It’s a simple point, and we all understand it. But we get caught up in the pursuit of quick wins and cheap effort, which dilutes the long term value and potential moat/flywheel we can build by indexing on unique competitive advantages and doing things that others can’t or won’t do.
Some more concrete examples I like:
The CXL Editorial Mission: Setting the Highest Bar
During my time at CXL, our editorial mission was to publish the best content ever written on conversion rate optimization and experimentation. Yes, the bar was high—almost impossible. But by committing to this standard, we didn’t just succeed in SEO; we built a vibrant community and a revenue-driving email list. To this day, prospects still reference those blog posts.
Value-Based Programmatic & Directory Content
It’s in vogue to look at programmatic SEO case studies, and think “I should do that! It looks easy (and cheap) compared to writing great content.” And it can be.
Easy, programmatic SEO strategies might seem attractive—after all, who doesn’t love high expected value? But the real question is: what if you measured your success not by effort saved, but by audience utility?
Look at sites like Marketing Examples or Really Good Emails. They didn’t cut corners; they created something genuinely useful for their audiences. That’s why they’re so valuable. I reference them all the time.
The same goes for Zapier’s integration pages—it’s not about title tag optimization. They performed because the strategy drove real, functional, and novel value.
As Eli Schwartz put it, “Zapier didn’t just build for traffic; they built a product that matched user intent for their business. Zapier didn’t build programmatic SEO because they could; they built a product using programmatic SEO tactics that enabled a helpful product.”
Telling an Actual Story
Sometimes a hard problem doesn’t necessitate grinding or working additional hours, but merely doing something that is rare.
I love Matthew Dicks’ book Storyworthy, and I recently read his business-focused book Stories Sell.
One big takeaway is that the mere act of telling a story – a real story – is rare and valuable. Even better if it’s a personal story, and even better if it’s vulnerable or humorous.
Because business communications have been so diluted by committees, conformity, fear, and lack of originality, doing the bare minimum – in this case, telling a personal and vulnerable story – has outsized leverage and value.
He illustrates this himself through the process of writing a “business book,” which are not known for being particularly entertaining. Throughout the book, he teaches you how to tell a story by…telling his own personal stories.
Solving hard problems makes easy problems easier
You may disagree, but my personal experience has shown me that doing 200+ podcast interviews is quite difficult.
Not because talking into a microphone is inherently difficult, but because the way we approached our own podcast was serious and effortful. Hours of research and focused conversation have gone into every single interview to make sure it was enjoyable and unique for the guest, but also so the episodes covered novel territory and audience value.
But because we indexed so heavily on quality conversations and interviews, many downstream content creation efforts are much easier.
- We have a veritable library of clips, snippets, and quotes we can use for organic social.
- We have quotes, references, and expertise we can drip throughout our blog posts, and it’s owned assets, not just third party references.
- We are now creating a print magazine based on the content (another pretty difficult initiative).
- We rarely have to wrestle with the question of what content to post, since we’ve already created such a rich library. Additionally, every guest is now acquainted with us, so when we host IRL meetups or want to collaborate in any way, our network is now amplified and powerful. “Cold” outreach isn’t so cold anymore.
I talked to our director of editorial, Sam Lund, about this concept this week, and he likened it to his morning mountain hikes. Once you hike a mountain, your daily walk to work becomes much easier.
There’s also likely a neurobiological effect that, simply by confronting challenges and tackling hard things, doing so in the future becomes easier and easier.
Hard problems are motivational and inspiring
I hate running.
I’ve never gotten a “runner’s high” or gone for a “relaxing jog.” A jog has never been “relaxing” to me.
So when my business partner David asked me to do a Spartan Beast Race in Hawaii, I said yes (because I wanted to visit Hawaii). This would be longer than I had ever run in my life, even ignoring the dozens of obstacles, hills and mud, and heat that I’d have to fight through.
By having that large and looming goal, it made running daily not only doable, but by the end of my training, genuinely enjoyable.
Now, I actually enjoy a 2-3 mile “relaxing” jog.
Big goals are motivational, and we’re often more capable than we think we are.
Our own team has gone through so many of these challenges that it’s tough to pick a single example (a few include writing 100 blog posts – manually – in a month, launching and building new services with major clients in real time, and building internal tools that facilitate new processes or services).
Benyamin Elias has one of my favorite essays on this idea: “Your team is wrong about what it can get done.”
Here’s a passage from the essay:
“[Big projects] require all hands on deck. They forced us into better communication and better execution, which in turn will make us better at executing the next projects we tackled.
Plus, they’re cool. They feel good to work on, they have greater potential to impact core parts of the business, and they encourage everyone on the team to hunt for ways to create an even better experience for our customers (instead of mindlessly executing a mediocre “playbook” in an attempt to hit numbers).
That’s how I want to encourage you to think — how can you get your team to think bigger, understand what they’re capable of, and become capable of even more?”
Summary: Focus on the Hard Problem at the Center
I’m not saying don’t do easy things or low hanging fruit.
But to win and win big, focus most of your mental energy and team bandwidth on the hard problems at the core (for all the aforementioned logical reasons and because they’re more fun).
I’ll leave you with a Paul Graham quote:
“I do make some amount of effort to focus on important topics. Many problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you’ll only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling.
The bigger question of what to do with your life is one of these problems with a hard core. There are important problems at the center, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones at the edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved in working on a specific problem, you’ll occasionally have to make big, lifetime-scale adjustments about which type of work to do. And the rule is the same: working hard means aiming toward the center — toward the most ambitious problems.”
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