Travis says: “My additional insight is that being able to identify where the consumer is across their entire search journey is absolutely crucial to leverage your SEO strategy and, ultimately, drum up demand for that consumer audience.”

Being able to identify where the consumer is.

Does that mean that you have to look at your analytics for lots of different platforms, different organic platforms, not just search, and perhaps even paid platforms, bring that data together into one common piece for analysis, and then make some joined-up approach to define who that consumer is and what they're doing?

“Yeah, exactly. I would say data layering absolutely plays a really crucial part. A lot of SEOs only look at 1 platform: Google. In my opinion, where the world is going, it's much more omnichannel and much more integrated across many platforms – be that AI search engines, social search engines like TikTok and Instagram, all the way over to very transactional search engines like Amazon, Walmart, or Target.

Expanding the scope of the data that you're ultimately looking at across all of these platforms can have a really, really big impact on understanding that consumer search journey, so you know exactly where that consumer is spending their time and how you can leverage each of those platforms in a different way, to reach those segmented audiences in a better way.

Data layering is important, but there's also a lot of audience work and audience research that needs to be done to really understand what type of audience is on each of those platforms and how that is different, so you can tailor the strategy to be unique to each of those platforms.”

You talked about search quite a bit there – you talked about different types of search engines, and you gave Amazon as an example there as well.

Does that mean that the role of SEO stops and ends with different types of search engines? Or would you go as far as to say that SEOs nowadays also have to be aware of the demand that you were talking about, but in relation to discovery as opposed to just search?

“In my opinion, we play a really crucial role across the entire consumer search journey. There are lots of different teams – brand teams, audience teams, etc. – that have really compelling research. But, without tying that research to any of the search data and the search research that you have, it's really difficult to build a winning strategy, in this day and age.

To your point, in my mind, expanding the scope of an SEO is how you ultimately yield success in this day and age. If you have a very narrow view of just Google, or you have a very narrow view of just one data set, you're probably going to see some very limited success, but not the wild omnichannel success that you ultimately need.

Look, at the end of the day, I don't know exactly whose job it is to integrate all of those channels together. But what I do know is SEOs, and the best SEOs out there are problem solvers. What we're seeing today is more audience segmentation and more audiences going across platforms. I think SEOs, as problem solvers, play a really important role in tying all of that together and being the leader on that work.”

How do you know where your audience's demand starts?

“Sometimes it's assumptions, I will be honest. If you are a very, very small brand or you are trying to define a new segment of the market, a lot of times it is based on assumptions.

In that case, you really have to go get user data. Go speak to those consumers and ask, ‘Hey, for this type of product or service, where would you start your search?’ If it's already a defined segment in the market – it's already a defined brand, etc. – there are loads of tools out there.

SparkToro is a fantastic audience research tool, and there are even tools like seoClarity. They have a tool that allows you to see what the keyword search was before the keyword you're ultimately looking at and what the keyword search was after the keyword that you were looking at.

Blending that data together allows you to really, really understand how people are searching across that entire consumer search journey. I'm happy to give a more explicit example if it's helpful.”

Yeah, perhaps we'll just come back to that for a second.

I was just stuck on the fact that you were also focusing on prior keywords and post keywords, before and after the keyword that you were actually focusing on.

Does that mean that your optimum path to actually starting with which keyword to choose to begin with is just going for the bottom-of-the-funnel keyword phrases and identifying which keywords are absolutely the bottom-of-the-funnel and there's no keyword after that? Or do you tend to optimize for a whole, most relevant, user journey and then expand out after that?

“Our strategy is optimized for that entire user journey. I think most SEOs just go after the bottom-of-the-funnel, easy-to-capture keywords. Again, that strategy worked for a decade but, in this day and age, we found that it can be very, very limiting.

The way to become a topical authority, which we know is favoured in Google and AI search engines even, is to really go after that entire consumer journey. Don't just answer that bottom-of-the-funnel keyword but really become an authority across every single layer and every single step.

The other point I'll add here is that, a lot of times, that's not just creating text/written content. That would include images, videos, etc., so you can show up across the SERP in that journey and in various ways.”

I was having a conversation with Tom Winter recently about how to go about selecting your topical authority and how to identify what Google perceives as your topical authority, through Google Search Console and seeing what keyword phrases are currently bringing you traffic and the traffic that's most likely to convert.

Do you have any thoughts on how Google perceives a site in terms of topical authority and how to go about selecting your own topical authority?

“Yeah, I've heard of SEOs doing this a bit differently. The craziest idea I've heard here (which I am not recommending, but it's how some people do it) is they stand up a website using generative AI to help build out a bunch of content about that topic, and then ultimately see what sticks/what doesn't stick for that particular site, and then integrate that into their client’s website.

A), I think that's a lot of work. B), I think you're missing the brand aspect and what the brand is seen as a topical authority in with Google in that way. What we do is ultimately assess the content similarity across what that brand is already showing up for on the SERP and then basically come up with a ‘right to rank’ score.

Do we believe that this website, as it stands, based on the performance of content lumped into that topic, has a right to rank for any other topics either within that category or tangentially related to that category?

From there, I would launch what I would call a few test pieces to see, when this brand writes this type of content, does it at least get on the top of page 2/bottom of page 1? If so, then, all of a sudden, that's a signal to us that, yes, this is good to go. We should lean more into it, but it's going to require a bit more work and we should expand our efforts.”

What if you have a right to rank for some keywords that you don't want to rank for, that perhaps Google is perceiving your site as being a topical authority on and something you don't want to be a topical authority on? Is it easy enough to change that?

“It is difficult. It takes time. This does happen, especially on much older brands or brands that have pivoted away from, say, an old product or an old brand name or anything like that. It definitely takes time.

The winning strategy that we have found is making sure that there are no remnants of a topic or brand name, etc., that you don't want to be known for. That can mean culling content that's on the website, which can be scary – especially if it's driving traffic.”

By culling, you wouldn't want to 301 redirect that because it would retain some authority for that topic, I guess. You're just getting rid of it completely.

“It's gone. Yeah, exactly.

But, going back to the audience, if you can build the story that the audience going to this type of content is not ultimately brand-aligned or business-aligned, then it can be a really effective strategy for you to wipe the plate clean, if you will, and then start rebuilding from there. But it takes time. It is a difficult process to shift.”

You also talk about the fact that you can make your SEO demand 10 times stronger by knowing where your audience interacts and meeting them there initially.

I would imagine that you're attempting to build more brand searches by doing this.

“Yeah, 100%. I think, again, this is where SEOs fall short a lot of times. We're so focused on non-brand, non-brand performance, and trying to pull all the levers we can on non-brand when, in reality, there's a lot of work we can do in brand and really building this and leaning into the community marketing of a brand.

This can include things like optimizing a support website or a help website to make sure that even people at the bottom of the funnel are easily able to find this branded information. That boosts brand sentiment, which leads to more word-of-mouth, and more word-of-mouth leads to more brand searches.

At the end of the day, I think that is an SEO's role and an SEO's responsibility.”

You talked about Amazon earlier on. Just using that as an example (or another search engine if you want), how do you go about encouraging people to leave that other site and then search on Google or another search engine to find your website and do more brand searches?

“I would say that's a futile effort. It's important to meet the consumer where they're at and create a seamless experience, no matter where they're landing from.

But, if you are an SEO that's very narrowly focused on Google and Google's performance rather than business KPIs and business performance, I can see the argument that we don't want people going to Amazon. We want people going to Google.

The reality is, Amazon is a beast. It owns the vast majority of product searches and product transactions. I think that brands that don't recognise that, don't lean into it, and don't optimize for that are missing out on huge opportunities.

Instead, what I would recommend – obviously brands have better margins of people purchasing through their websites, etc. I understand the appeal. You get first-party marketing data, so you can remarket to them.

But a better way to do that is, within the packaging that you're sending through Amazon, have a little postcard that has a QR discount code. Then, when people repurchase that product, they go through the website and, at that point, you're able to capture them.

Rather than trying to make the experience online difficult, where someone is already spending their time, make it seamless digitally, and then try to find other avenues to bring that person back through, like offline media, product, etc.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time thinking about demand generation and other platforms in 2025?

“I would say dashboarding. I see so many SEOs spend so much time trying to fix any type of Looker Studio report or Tableau report.

Don't get me wrong, reporting is crucial, especially to show our value, but what's even better is data analysis. Find a way to automate the reporting and the dashboarding part of it so you, individually, can spend more time on data analysis, understanding where the audience is, and how they ultimately play across all those different channels.”

Can you automate that data analysis nowadays as well?

“Absolutely. I very much don't want to overstate my expertise. I'm not a data engineer but our wonderful team of data engineers at Brainlabs do this day in, day out.

It allows us to have great dashboards that have great uptime, and allows us to focus on bigger things like how do we build impact trackers? How do we build competitive search dashboards that actually allow us to drive more insights from that data, rather than us just recreating any of the insights that you're going to get from an analytics platform like GA4 or Adobe Analytics?

Typically, what I see out of most SEO dashboards is just recreating the data sets that already exist in those other platforms. Or worse, what I see in a lot of SEO reporting is transcribing the data from, say, a dashboard to a PowerPoint slide or something like that.

In my opinion, there is such a better way to spend that time than transcribing data between platforms.”

Lastly, in relation to these demand generation opportunities or alternative search engines like Amazon, if an e-commerce SEO specialist is listening to this at the moment, would you recommend to them that the next skill that they should learn is Amazon SEO?

“Absolutely. Yes. I would even extend it to look at things like TikTok shopping and how you can integrate that into your strategy, especially from a discovery lens.

But, at the end of the day, Amazon SEO is a very elementary version of Google SEO. It's really important to not only optimize on that platform, but make sure that, when you optimize on that platform, it's not cannibalising other efforts and you're really able to meet the audiences where they're at.”

You don't want to be ranking on Google for Amazon above your own websites. Optimize, but not too much, maybe. “Exactly.”

Travis Tallent is VP of SEO at Brainlabs, and you can find him over at BrainlabsDigital.com.