Be in the right place at the right time

Ryan says: “Leverage multi-channel SEO, along with customer journey matching for a two-pronged approach.

First, you need to understand where your audience is, where they spend their time, what platforms they visit, where they communicate with other people, and where you can show up to generate the maximum amount of impact.

The second prong is customer journey matching. You want to match where they are in their journey to the platform they're using. Some businesses might still find a lot of success with top-of-funnel content, social media posts, and generating interest on Reddit and similar platforms.

As people dive down into the deeper stages – the middle and bottom of the funnel – the platforms they use will probably move. They might communicate with other people. They might start talking on other platforms.

It's about creating the right type of content and putting that content in the right place to make sure that you're seen when you need to be seen, for the right stage of that journey.”

How do you determine where your audience is?

“It can be done in one of two ways. There are tools out there. The primary tool is SparkToro, Rand Fishkin's tool. They use a whole lot of Datos data to find out where people are searching for different things and what platforms they're spending their time on. You can do that through search queries, by describing your audience, by looking for job titles that you might be targeting, and that kind of thing.

Or you can use a more manual approach and talk to customers, brand advocates, etc. Survey them and say, ‘We know you're a customer of ours. What pain points did you have in the very beginning of your journey? Were you searching on Google? Were you using LLMs? Were you talking to different people on social media? Then, as you got more interested, where did you go from there? Finally, where was the decision made to talk to us/buy from us/sign up for a subscription?’

You can use that data to then map it. You can say that a lot of the purchase decisions are made in X, Y, and Z areas, and the top of the funnel comes from these other areas, and you can start to map a journey – and a strategy to match that.”

What do you look at in SparkToro, and what do you use for countries outside the UK, US, and Canada?

“For us, it's a combination of things. If we're researching for what we imagine is going to be a top-of-funnel blog post, we'll start by searching the main keyword that we want to target in SparkToro to find out where that particular audience is spending their time. Then we can recreate that content to match those platforms.

In terms of other countries, you can still use that SparkToro data; it’s just a case of finding the closest match. If you're in Brazil, you might find that the US audience more closely relates to your audience than the UK audience, for instance.

If there really is a big gap and you can't necessarily use that data, then it would come down to a more manual approach of talking to customers or going out and doing your own research and scrolling through social media.

It comes down to old sales tactics for finding the right customers and where they are.”

How do you determine where your audience is likely to be in different stages of their journey?

“For us, as an example, we start by using last click attribution. We know that they signed up for a trial in X location, then we can map their journey from there using different tools.

GA4 is good for this because it’s events-based, so we can track different events that happened. We can drill down beyond where they finally purchased and look at the different events that were created in different sessions. We can almost work backwards.

You can also go back to that manual approach of speaking to loyal customers. Their data is going to be really accurate because they will remember what it was that they did. You can use customer interviews to fill the gaps where you can't see the whole journey through GA4 because of issues like privacy settings and things like that.”

Do you build multiple customer journeys for the different touchpoints and places where people might be online?

“We do have multiple journeys, but we also have a primary customer journey, if you like.

Our primary customer journey might be that they see a piece of blog content, which is very top-of-funnel and informative. Then they might see our name mentioned on social media and relate it back to that content. They say, ‘I remember that name because they really helped me with this problem that I had earlier.’

Then they might Google us and come back to our website from a direct visit, typing our URL into Google and signing up for a trial from there. That could be considered our primary customer journey, in terms of the percentage of trials that we get.

However, we know from our data that we also have customers who sign up for trials but have never even seen our website beforehand. What we're seeing more recently is people finding our name mentioned in an LLM. Then they might move to social media and have a little look around there. Then, when they decide that they are ready to buy, they might quickly go onto the website and sign up for a trial, but they never really see our top-of-funnel content. All they really see is a mention in an LLM, then a quick search on social media.

We can map different customer journeys for that, but we always want to be focussed on the one that is driving the most leads, the most conversions, etc. That's where the primary customer journey comes in. That's the one we're going to spend most of our time on.

We'll fill in bits for different customer journeys here and there, when we have the time and budget.”

Do you use GA4 to try and establish the different stages in the journey and attribute a likely value to those?

“As much as we can. For us, this all started with a quick report in GA4 to find out which blog posts on our website led to trial clicks and clicks to the form to sign up for a trial. It all started from there.

We realised that people were dropping off and then coming back at different points. From there, rather than just tracking the content that's working in terms of trials, we also started to look at where people drop off. Do they then come back from a different platform? Do they have a different referrer?

This is why I'm now a big advocate for avoiding ‘churn cycle SEO’, and really focussing on the customer journey and the attribution from that.”

Is churn cycle SEO just throwing as many people as possible at a blog post in the hopes that some of them convert?

“Essentially. Before I start bashing anyone, we have all been guilty of this in the past.

I describe it as a keyword rank cycle. You pick a keyword, you write some content, you rank for it, and that's cool. That's in the AI overview now, or it's in the top position in search. You’ll come back to that and refresh it in a little bit, but then you move on to the next keyword that you can target, or the next blog post you can write.

The question is, if this piece of content were removed from your site right now, would anyone notice or care? If the answer is no, then that might have been the wrong piece of content to create in the first place.

Content production still has value. We know that it leads to trial clicks and that kind of thing, but the percentage of blog posts that we have on our site compared to the percentage of ones that actually generate business for us is a whole different ratio than what we thought it might've been originally.”

How do you establish intent, and how do you decide what content is most likely to resonate at that moment in time?

“Some of it comes down to intuition, as a lot of marketing subjects will.

If someone's looking at a very informative blog post on a website, for a very top-of-the-funnel search, then they're generally going to be in the very early stages – that research stage. They might have no interest in signing up at all. They're probably just looking for an answer to a problem.

If they're going to social media, they might be starting to get to the middle of the funnel. They're still looking for information, but they might be about to ask people for product recommendations and things like that, or they might be interested in who works at the company, what kind of content they put out, screenshots of the tool/images of the product, etc.

If they start getting into the LLM journey or onto the features page on a website, or even the pricing page, then there's real purchase intent there. They're looking at the features that we offer, or they're looking at the products that we have. They’re looking at our prices compared to competitors. They’re looking at LLMs to ask, ‘If I’m using this tool, what can it do for me?’ We can deduce from there that they are probably in the buying stage.

Then it comes down to the type of content that we create. We know that, for us, creating a 4,000-word guide on SEO testing might not be great for someone who has purchase intent. They already know what is going to help. If we can drill down and improve our features page, and add in the new features that we've built, then that's going to be more useful.

If they're in the middle of the funnel, then we still want to be informative, but we might want to drop different product features in there, naturally, in a little bit of the content that we put out.

Then, top-of-funnel content will always be top-of-funnel content. That's just focussed on being as informative as possible, with limited CTAs and that kind of thing. Let's just help someone solve a problem at the first port of call.”

How do you track organic performance on other platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, LLMs, and YouTube?

“For us, it's quite manual at the moment. We essentially have a master spreadsheet that tracks how many visits we had, how many impressions we had on social media, how many views our blog got, how many views our videos got, etc., month-on-month.

Then we drill down and look at lead data. Within our internal CMS, we have the number of people who signed up for a trial. We have where their first visit was and where their last visit was, before clicking on the trial page and signing up. Then, we can start to match that. We can see people who came from organic first and then came back via YouTube, or people who visited us first through ChatGPT and then came back through a direct visit.

Essentially, for us, it's a big, messy spreadsheet at the moment, that needs a lot of time and care (and probably some work from my side) to make it look better – but it is useful. We can see the big array of numbers and then drill down into lead data, which we can then use to adapt our strategy going forward.

We can say that, if a lot of people are starting to see us first on social media, let's put some more effort into that. If a sponsorship that we did for a newsletter generated a lot of leads this month, we can do that again.”

Are things like social media and sponsorship going to be part of an SEO's role moving forward?

“I think it's going to be more of an SEO's role as time goes on. The one thing that every SEO can agree on at the minute is that clicks from organic traffic are going down. It's just how it is.

We're seeing a click drop-off from AI overviews, and AI Mode is starting to become more and more prominent in search. People will start using that more and more. As the role of an SEO evolves, we need to think of ourselves less as just Google, Bing, and platforms like that. We need to try and adapt our role into multichannel SEO.

At the end of the day, things will evolve and become search engines. We saw all this data and these news articles coming out years ago that TikTok is now a search engine because people are using it to search for things. The same will happen with LLMs. They won't just be tools for helping us to do things faster; they will be things that people use for search.

People are already doing it. People are starting to search for things on platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Search engines aren't just Google and Bing nowadays; they are also these different platforms that are coming in. People are using YouTube as a search engine. People are using LLMs as a search engine.

As that starts to happen more and more, our role really does need to adapt and change. More of that kind of stuff, like sponsorships and social media, will start to come into it.”

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

“First, before you start creating any content on your website, you need to find out where your audience is so you can adapt that content to fit.

Then, you need to map that audience research to your customer journey.

You need to know what you’re creating for the top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, the bottom of the funnel, and everything in between.”

Ryan Jones is a Marketing Manager at SEOTesting. Find out more over at SEOTesting.com.