Tevfik says: “I would say that SEO is no longer just about traditional search engines. Today's search happens across multiple platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Maps, App Stores, and AI chatbots, and we need to optimize for all of them.

At SEO Sherpa, we actually have a term for this year - ‘Search Everywhere Optimization’, and it's about understanding where your audience actually searches and making sure you show up on those platforms. So as a recommendation, I think we should focus on different search platforms with SEO basics, of course, to gain more visibility and brand authority. And you can also utilize AI and marketing automations to scale your strategy on different search platforms.”

You mentioned quite a few different search platforms there. Is that appropriate for every type of business? So, for instance, no matter the country, the geography or the category of business, would you still recommend optimizing for all of those platforms that you listed?

“Actually, you can apply all of these recommendations for the different platforms for every type of business. But I would say this approach is especially important for local businesses, e-commerce brands, and service providers, definitely, and any company that wants to build stronger visibility across multiple channels.”

It would be good to focus in on maybe what you view as the top three platforms or so, and perhaps cover the SEO nuances that are appropriate for each platform, what you have to do just to optimise the best for each individual platform. So you mentioned Reddit and a few others there. So which platforms would you pick out and which elements of SEO would you like to highlight for those platforms?

“It depends on your business needs and it depends on your target audience. So I would suggest first to map out where your audience is searching.

You can check your Google Analytics 4, you can check the referral traffic, where they come from. You can also use different tools like HotJar or Microsoft Clarity to understand the behaviour on the website. So, for example, if you positioned one YouTube video on your blog article, and if you see the users are watching that YouTube video instead of reading the whole of your article and the text, you should probably focus on the YouTube SEO. So you can pick your top three platforms based on your audience and based on your business needs.

And then you can apply all the SEO basics to those platforms.”

Which metrics do you look for inside GA4 to determine the top platforms for you?

“You can check many metrics. You can check the demographics from GA4. You can also check the source/medium traffic resources. For instance, if your visitors are coming from ChatGPT or Perplexity.

You may consider optimizing your content according to those prompts. You can do keyword research and you can generate different prompts around each keyword and you can put those prompts to your content within the heading or within the FAQ questions so you can target them.

But I would say the referral traffic is the best part for checking the search area to identify the search behaviour platforms.”

What about if you're working for a business, a new business with a new website, how do you determine what platforms are likely to be best for you?

“Let's say we have a mobile application. So we want to get organic traffic and paid traffic and we want to convert our visitors

If I have a mobile application, I would probably focus on ASO, app store optimization. So I would start with optimizing my title text, subtitles, short descriptions, long descriptions on the app stores. I would also use AI to enhance my screenshots and the tutorial videos on App Store or Google Play.

I would also create a YouTube channel. I would generate a lot of content, many YouTube videos to show how they can use my application or my tool or my product. then I would also create blog posts to highlight the best features of that application. It depends on your needs, as I mentioned before.

You can probably start with paid search. And for organic, you should definitely optimize your App Store and YouTube channel. But if you are a local business and if you have multiple brands, of course, you should focus on Google Maps or Bing Maps.

You can generate location-based content. You can create more eye-catching images using AI. You can optimize your content and titles for your different showrooms on Google. It depends on your audience and your business type.”

Let's drill into the individual tools that you mentioned, or some of them at least. So with YouTube as part of the strategy, are you just talking about building a brand strategy for YouTube? So when people search your brand, then your videos also appear in the SERP?

“Yes, exactly, because everyone is searching a different platform for different needs. You can also get more pixels and more space on the SERP with your YouTube videos, but you can also get more traffic and more audience from the YouTube search.

If you optimize your YouTube channel and your YouTube videos with adding more specific keywords based on the according to trends or the search volumes if you optimize your videos with the end cards and the tags so you can get more audience, you can be more visible on YouTube search as well and you can also show up on Google search and you can get more pixels because you know the organic search is.

I'm not going to say SEO is dead and traditional SEO is dead - but SERP elements are eating our organic traffic day by day. So we should prepare ourselves for that. That's why we should optimize our content, our strategy for different channels, so we can get more traffic with YouTube videos on the SERP or News, Google Shopping or map views.”

You also mentioned a couple of times using AI to enhance your images. How do you go about doing that? What images do you select and what AI do you use to do this?

“That's a good question. I just gave that as an example, but of course you can do many things with AI, especially for image generation. With the new features of GPT-4.0 in the ChatGPT, you can create accurate images for your business.

You can create thumbnails for your YouTube videos. You can pull different thumbnails from your competitors and then feed your data, you can train your large language model or your AI dataset and then you can prompt to create more eye-catching thumbnails based on your competitors for your next video. That could be a really good strategy.

You can also do many more things with AI. For example, you can pull consumer reviews from Google Maps and you can identify pain points, feedback and complaints. Then based on that one, you can do sentiment analysis using AI and you can improve your product or your service. Or for Reddit, for example, you can scrape Subreddits and Reddit articles to understand the discussion around your product or the site topic.

So you can ask AI to generate FAQ questions based on that discussion and you can use that content for your FAQ content on your website.”

There are many more things to do in SEO than there used to be. I'm sure 10 years ago there weren't as many things that you could do. So how do you prioritise what you need to do? How do you determine the activity that is likely to have the biggest ROI?

“Yeah, that's also a really good question. If I already have a website full of content, I would focus on the traditional SEO techniques. But at the same time, I want to convert that traffic…

I have an example for an insurance website. So an insurance website will probably have different products or services. But at the same time you’ll probably have a blog. Obviously you will get more traffic to your blog than your service pages.

What you can do for your traditional SEO is to internally link your blog articles to your service pages, to convert that traffic.

If you focus on specific vertices for different channels, you can convert your visitors more easily.

For example, if your audience is Gen Z, you might be wise to focus on TikTok, because they tend to search on TikTok.

So, you should generate more YouTube videos on YouTube to explain your products and you can also target side topics related to your verticals, related to your main products on other channels.

That's how you can increase your ROI and you can convert them easily because, from now on, SEO isn’t just going to be about increasing organic traffic. It’ll be about targeting the right audience for your niches and converting them.”

How do you measure your ROI? Can you measure everything on GA4?

“No, you can't! I think that's the most important question and that's the most challenging part, especially for the Search Everywhere era. You can still check GA4, you can check bounce rate, you can check average time duration, but my suggestion would be for Search Everywhere, you can measure success by platform specific metrics.

For example, if you have a YouTube channel, the metrics should be views, likes, subscriptions, engagement metrics, alongside average watch time and rankings. But if you are a local business, you need to check impressions and the direction requests or the number of clicks you are getting from the city on your Google Business Profile. If you have Reddit, I would say engagement and brand mentions are key.

If you want to be on ChatGPT or Perplexity, you should also check the brand mentions. You should generate prompts around your main keywords and you should check whether or not you are appearing for those prompts. But in my current agency, we are working on key search metrics. What this means is that you should identify the different search platforms for your client's needs or for your business needs, and after that, apply weighting for different platforms.

Then you can calculate all of them, merge them, and you can have one true search metric. So when you want to measure success, you can say that, ‘okay, my impressions are going down on Search Console, but at the same time, my views are going up on YouTube, or I'm getting more clicks from ChatGPT or Perplexity citations’.

That would be the best way to measure the success of Search Everywhere.”

But if you're looking at metrics like views and impressions, then obviously that doesn't necessarily relate directly to a purchase being made. Do you attempt to tie these things back to some kind of purchase being made, or is that just impossible?

“I wouldn't say it's impossible. You can still check assisted conversion traffic from GA4.

You can check the user journey and funnels. If they are searching from ChatGPT and if they are coming to your website, you can still tag them and tag their session and you can track them if they are buying on your website or not.

Also, recently ChatGPT launched a shopping feature. Probably from now on, you will be able to buy something directly from ChatGPT results. They may well have a collaboration with different e-commerce websites like Shopify for the purchase step.

In the future, it will be easier to measure the purchase part and the conversion part. But for now, you can just check the user funnels and the user journey, then you can estimate the traffic and the buyer intent coming from different platforms.”

An SEO has used GA4, they've analysed their audience, they've decided which are the optimum referring sources or modern search engines to focus on in terms of their SEO activities. How do you further enhance what you're doing? Can you use AI to optimise your strategy?

“I would say you should also combine AI skills with automation skills.

If you know Zapier or Make.com or N8N, you can use AI more efficiently. I'm going to give you just one example for automation and AI. What you can do, is that you can use N8N, you can combine this with a SERP API and an AI agent. You can use cloud, ChatGPT, Perplexity, whatever you want and extract data from the SERP results, analyze it with your AI agent within N8N, within your workflow.

This means that you can create your content strategy based on your competitors. This is an example. Using AI you can definitely enhance your strategy. You can also use AI for content generation, forecasting, analyzing your audience and conducting sentiment analysis.”

What is a key actionable takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“In a nutshell, SEO is extending beyond traditional search engines. It's now about being everywhere your audience is searching. And by applying SEO basics across different platforms and using AI to work smarter, you can make your brand easier to find and more trusted by your audience.

So I would say, I mean, think beyond Google. Search happens everywhere, and that's where your brands need to be.”

Tevfik Mert Azizoğlu is the SEO & AI Lead at SEO Sherpa, and you can find him over at SEOSherpa.com.