Switch seats with your customers to discover how they search

Eli says: “Map out your customer journey and figure out where search fits.”

How do you start mapping an actual search journey?

“It's very, very simple: you switch chairs.

Marketers always have this marketing hat on when they're trying to sell something. Their boss gives them something, or it's their own product, and they put their marketing hat on. ‘What are the things I need to do? How do I package this? How do I promote it? What should the price be for SEO? What should my keywords be? What should my pages look like? How much content do I need? Who am I going to hire to do this?’

Just switch seats. Go to the other side of the table and pretend you're the customer for a moment.

If you're marketing a pair of shoes, how would you buy them? Would you first go to Google to search for shoes? Would you not go to Google? Would you go to a store? Would you ask your friends, ‘You always used to wear Crocs to work, but now you need new shoes. What kind of shoes do you wear?’ Is that a search you might do, or is that something you ask your friends?

That's where you start. Just switch seats. Think like a customer; feel like a customer. That's how you start mapping out the user journey.”

Do you use software to help you understand what your users may be doing?

“You don't need to. You start by just switching seats and pretending you're that user.

If I'm selling Majestic, SEO software is a crowded space. What would that user look for? There are many ways to market Majestic, even just from an SEO perspective. What is the user going to Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or wherever to look for?

When you're mapping out this user journey, you want to bring personas into it. Is a user going to use their phone to look for Majestic? Are they going to use their computer? Are they going to use voice search? Will they type out a query? Will they search with a camera? These are all part of mapping out their user journey.

That's how you come up with the playbook that you're going to use.

Tools do fit into this. Once you have determined that, when a user is searching for ‘shoes’, ‘vacation’, ‘Majestic’, etc., they're going to use their desktop computer, and then they're going to type some keywords, then you might be ready to go to a keyword research tool.

You’ve figured out that they're going to be doing keyword searches. You’ve also figured out that they're going to be looking for ‘backlinks’, and that's the keyword they're looking for. Now, what are the words that these real humans – the real customers that you’ve mapped out – would use? You can use keyword research tools to do that.

Before you even get to that, one of my favourite keyword research tools is just doing a quick Google search. You're typing into Google search, you're not hitting enter, and you're seeing what's suggested. There are tools that you can use for this, like AnswerThePublic, Ahrefs, Majestic, and Semrush all have them. There are a lot of different keyword suggestion tools, where you're getting the things that people are searching for.

That will seed ideas about what that journey looks like. It might be ‘Majestic pricing’, ‘Majestic promo, ‘Majestic vs X other tool’. You're now starting to understand that journey because ‘Majestic vs X’ means that they compare you to something. If someone looks for ‘Majestic vs HubSpot’, Majestic might not consider themselves a competitor to HubSpot, but users do. That's an interesting insight. Now you have another clue for your user journey.

Going back to shoes for a second, what if someone searches: ‘Crocs vs fancy black loafers’? You didn't think that someone looking for fancy black loafers would be in the same ballpark as Crocs, but they are, because that's what they're searching for. It really helps you to understand the user journey.

Those are the tools that I would use, but at a simplistic level, you don't need tools.”

Are you talking about the keyword phrases a user will type within the buyer journey, or the different places they are likely to visit?

“The actual buyer journey, starting from the beginning.

If I'm looking for a backlink research tool, how do I go about finding that? You're mapping out that journey. You can be yourself and just pretend that you're that user, you can go into AI and create some personas, or you can do a survey where you ask people how they would go and find those things.

Now, you may discover that 80% of your market is going to go to Slack and say, ‘Hey, has anybody ever bought Majestic? Any thoughts on it? What would you use for backlink research?’ If that's where they're getting those ideas, that's not SEO, so you know to cut out 80% of the TAM of people you're approaching. You've distilled it down.

Let's say, out of 100 people, only 20 of them are going to be doing search. Some of those 20 people may even be clicking on paid ads within search. So, you knock it down to 15 out of the entire 100. Therefore, 15% of your market is doing a Google search. Now you can try to figure out the Google searches those people are doing.

That’s for SEO, but I wouldn’t only think of SEO. What are those 5% who click paid ads going to click on? What kind of ads do we need to feed them? Are they pricing-based, competitor-based, research-based, feature-based, etc.?

Then, there are the 80% who go into Slack and ask their friends. Now, you need a whole new strategy for getting into those Slack groups. How do you become recommended? That becomes something where you might promote your own user base and build out something where they should recommend you. However, it starts at the top, with a full user journey.”

What has surprised you the most about a user journey that you've identified?

“The biggest surprise is that marketers never use them. They skip it.

I'm a consultant and I talk to companies that are looking to engage in SEO. I ask, ‘Where in the buyer's journey are they doing SEO?’ and that's not a question they've ever thought of before. That surprises me. They want to do SEO, but they don't know what their SEO user looks like or even when their user would be going onto search.

When it comes to user research, and I'm actually talking to users, I typically find that the assumptions that have been made are wrong. The users might be looking for quality, but the company is marketing around a price. That’s a mismatch. If you put, ‘We are the cheapest,’ but they're actually looking for, ‘We are the best,’ you miss – or vice versa.

If you're promoting yourself as ‘We are the best. We have the highest ratings on Trustpilot,’ but users don't care, and they're willing to spend less to get the cheapest, your marketing is mismatched. That's the biggest thing that I've discovered.

By just talking to users, you discover insights you wouldn't otherwise have known.”

Have user journeys changed significantly over the last three years or so?

“Absolutely. The big thing I've discovered is that most SEO searches are now going to be in the middle-of-funnel, rather than the top-of-funnel.

If someone goes into Google or ChatGPT and types in a top-of-funnel phrase like ‘SEO tool’, you are now going to get a list of tools – in ChatGPT, in AI Mode, or in an AI overview – like Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic, etc. Now, that user will move to mid-funnel, which might be ‘Semrush vs Majestic’.

That has changed because they now have different ways to get top-of-funnel information, in a totally separate space. There’s a lot of commoditised content that was invented centuries ago, like medical content. You had many websites that shared that medical content, and they competed with each other for rankings. Now, though, that top-of-funnel belongs to AI search.

If you search for ‘headache’, ‘insomnia’, or any sort of condition, you no longer need to go to those websites, so those websites have lost that traffic. However, there is still SEO relevance for them, depending on the product or service they offer; they just need to move to a place in the funnel where the users have now been educated on what they need to solve that problem.”

Do you tend to focus on one single user journey, or do you build multiple user journeys to target multiple personas?

“There are always multiple journeys, but there will be user journeys that fit a large percentage of users.

A huge mistake that people make when they come up with user journeys is that they try to have a catch-all. I recently talked to an American bank that wanted to do SEO, and they were doing a catch-all: ‘We want men, women, old, young, from every single state.’ It's hard to market that because there are no specifics there.

Then, I said, ‘Well, who are your users?’ and they said, ‘Our users are everybody.’ So, I said, ‘Is there something that represents 30-40% of your users?’ and they said, ‘Of course: women in their 30s who live in urban areas.’ Now, they can make a user journey that meets 40% of their entire user base, and they can make specific pages for them.

Maybe there’s something about women in their 30s who live in urban areas that will resonate better with them, both in the keywords that they optimize for and in the page content that will help them convert. Whatever the trigger is, how do you best reach them?

You can have multiple journeys. You don't need to have a journey for every single customer, but for starters, come up with a journey that meets most of your converting customers.”

Once you’ve identified a specific user, would you make it obvious in your content that you're writing specifically for that person?

“I absolutely would.

Once you've identified this user journey, you want to find the trigger. What is the trigger that's making this cohort carry out a search for the new service? Then, what's the trigger that's going to make them convert?

Something prompts this cohort to go to Google to switch. Their bank account's no longer effective for them, so they're now looking for a new bank account. What do you need to say to them to make them convert, contact a salesperson, and go into a branch?

The page is specific, so whatever those triggers are (they got married, divorced, had a first child, or moved from the suburbs to the urban area), include that trigger on the page. Show the specific way that you approach that cohort. Give examples of how you have solved their problems. Your pictures, your images, your examples, and your case studies should match who you know that user to be.

You don't have to say, ‘We know who you are,’ but it helps to identify and have that empathy built into it.”

What are your thoughts on attribution, in terms of identifying the value of each touchpoint on the journey towards making a purchase?

“No one's ever going to do this right.

In a bigger company, you want to fight for some sort of multi-touch attribution. In a smaller company, where you don’t have the ability to build a multi-touch attribution model, you have a hope and a prayer.

The truth is that marketing rarely has good attribution, and social’s even worse. How do you know that there was a view-through? You do know the view-through if you have done paid. If you are doing Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, you would know the view-through if you did a paid campaign, but you don't know your attribution on organic. However, social somehow can get their teams funded, and they're going to keep doing things, even though it's way up at top-of-funnel.

Paid traffic usually ends up getting a lot of the credit for conversions because we're missing all those other touchpoints. You're missing the brand touchpoints, so you're overweighting against paid.

If you can, try to build a model, but more than likely you'll never get anything close to perfect. What you'll have to do is look at things that are not converting, like traffic. Within the cohort you have identified, what traffic are you getting? Look at the page you’ve built for that cohort and the traffic that page is getting. Then, if you look at your cohort mapping, are your conversions increasing within that cohort?

However, you won't have a perfect indication that it was SEO, social, or anything else which drove that traffic.”

Eli, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Care about your users. Have customer empathy.

The first thing you should do for an SEO campaign is be your customer, feel like your customer, and think like your customer.”

Eli Schwartz is the author of Product-Led SEO. Find out more over at ProductLedSEO.com.