Embrace omnichannel marketing to influence user behaviour before they search

Joshua says: “Omnichannel marketing is going to be essential for SEO success in 2025. Omnichannel marketing is going to turn the typical SEO approach on its head by influencing audience behaviour before they get to the search engine.

There is an important distinction between multichannel and omnichannel. Omnichannel means thinking about all of the different channels at the same time while a multichannel approach might consider different channels but not tie them together.

SEOs currently live in the multichannel world. Years back, SEOs were talking about taking PPC data and using that for SEO insights. As SEOs, we’re not unfamiliar with multichannel. We’ve learned a few neat tricks and some of us still use them, but it’s not the most effective approach.

Over the past year specifically, since Google’s come off its wheels and AI is starting to take over, it’s become more important that we’re reaching users and not relying on SEO tricks to influence Google’s platform. We need to use the platform to ensure that we’re reaching our users, but our users need to want to find us before they get in front of the search engine.”

Has SEO become marketing now?

“The SEO portion remains the same, for the most part. Tech SEO, keyword research, competitor analysis, etc. – these things still matter.

However, as SEOs, instead of looking at the entire universe of possibilities, we see things like programmatic SEO. They take a bucket of keywords and blow it up into a bunch of pages. People who are really good at it keep it managed. They put a fence around the intent and make sure they’re not getting outside of what the business does or what the audience expects.

That’s great, but we should be thinking about the business objectives of the business we work for, or the client’s business if you’re an agency SEO. Reaching beyond the basics of SEO to think critically about achieving those business objectives, and where we fit into the larger puzzle, helps us gain greater reach and more effectively influence our audiences.

It’s not turning us into generic marketers, but it’s going to require more generic marketing knowledge than SEOs have been used to having in the past.”

Has this always been true, or has it become more important recently?

“The Google leak certainly did not hurt – and even before the leak, there was the information that came out in the deposition, like NavBoost. I’ve been doing SEO for 17 years. I heard the theory that something like NavBoost existed and to see that validated was fantastic.

That immediately represented an opportunity. It shook me out of the SEO bag of tricks and made me focus more on holistic marketing strategy.

At the end of the day, NavBoost is about branded search, and brands have absolute control over branded search. The problem is most brands aren’t thinking about branded search. We haven’t seen brands thinking at scale about how messaging influences search. It’s been a very passive thing, but now there’s an opportunity to make it more of an active thing.”

Can smaller businesses think about branded search, or do they have to focus on generic queries?

“There’s a balance to be maintained. There’s still value in unbranded search. You’ll never know what the cap on your audience is unless you’re constantly trying to grow. Any business, especially in a capitalistic market, is always going to find ways to grow.

If you’re a small business, simply saying that you sell wrenches is good. Even if you went garage to garage and said, ‘I sell wrenches’, you’d find customers. However, you could start taking out billboards and attaching your name to wrenches, to the thought of wrenches.

In the US there’s a company called Snap-on, and they make aspirational tools for mechanics. They’re incredibly pricey, but they’re incredibly well-made, well-warrantied, and attractive. They have built that reputation. If I offered you a tool from one of two companies, and I put two logos side by side and one of those is Snap-on, the affinity is already there. That instant affinity is something we don’t have in unbranded search.

As a new business, or as somebody who hasn’t established strong branded search, you start with unbranded. You have to generate some awareness that you exist. In a lot of cases, that just sort of happens. If you build a website and you’re selling a SaaS solution, a small number of people will find you and you can build off of that.

However, at the same time you’re building non-brand, you should be figuring out how you’re going to establish brand. You want to figure out the messaging of the people who have interacted in a non-branded engagement. What have they liked about you? What messaging that you’ve put in front of them has worked? What messaging have they seen, whether it’s paid ads, digital, outdoor, billboards, or whatever? What are the things they seem to be responding to? How can you test and activate those?

When you find the formula, that starts to solidify your brand messaging and brand identity. People might like you because your customer service is outstanding. You might sell the same thing as everybody else at roughly the same price, but they’ll come back to you because they like your customer service. That was Zappos’ success story years ago, and look at them now.”

How do you tailor that messaging so people are likely to remember it after the fewest number of touchpoints?

“The fewest number of possible touchpoints is going to be different for everybody. I’m an old-school marketer. I started as a copywriter in traditional advertising, and I carry a lot of that knowledge with me. One of the things you used to hear around the shop was that Coca-Cola brands its trucks for a reason. That is really powerful. It’s about passive consumption. You can take the words out of the Coca-Cola logo and it is still recognisable around the world.

A major news organisation took traditional logos and removed the text to see if people could identify these global corporations. They could. Brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Nike are universal. There’s something to be said for connecting the visual to the feeling about the brand, and the experience of shopping with the brand.

Leaving people with that positive feeling about your brand really comes down to knowing who your ideal customer profile is. A lot of businesses these days haven’t meaningfully thought about this, and don’t stick to it. You need to build your core audience, and you want to go for the largest possible core audience. If you can define that well, you can define their interests.

My favourite example is the pet goods company Chewy. If you have a pet, they are without argument one of the best places to shop because they feel the same way about your pet that you do. You get birthday emails for our dog. That’s enough of an interaction. It doesn’t require you to do anything – they’re not asking you to buy, there’s no link – it’s just a nice email. That has a lot of meaning.

You can take simple interactions that matter to your users, along the lines of what your business does.

Some people have veered away from that in the past and been successful. Cards Against Humanity was a great example, where the whole concept was outlandish PR stunts from a company that sells an outlandish product. That works for them, but it’s too broad for standard commerce. You can’t translate that into pipe fittings or gloves.

It’s on you to know who your audience is, what lives they lead, and how you can connect with them in ways that matter – in ways that are real. The internet has gone very heavily into authentic engagement since the early 2000s, and inauthenticity stands out and rubs people the wrong way.”

How do SEOs reach out to other channels and assist them with data or insights that can blend everything together more effectively?

“I’m a helpful person. I like helping other people and, would you believe it, humans respond best when you offer them assistance.

As an SEO, whether it’s in an agency or in-house, go to other departments and say, ‘Hey, what KPIs are you working on? What are you guys driving towards this quarter? What’s the big activity?’ Then, think critically about where you plug into that. What touchpoints do they have that could be yours as well?

Email is my favourite example. Email is, hands down, the most underrated channel. It doesn’t get the love that it should, and it’s got an affinity for SEO that most SEOs overlook. If you go to email, they obviously want signups – and they want qualified signups. SEOs inform the content on the page. We inform the title tags that people are going to see and drive clicks to those pages where the signups exist. Instead of having passive signups, you can offer to work with the email team on the messaging on these landing pages.

That’s also a great opportunity to drag your PPC pals into it. What sort of ads are they running? What’s the text on those? What are the highest CTRs? Now that you’ve got everyone around a table, start plotting a path – whether it’s from the first PPC click, a remarketing click, or a search click to that page – where everyone’s driving to a single thing. Then follow the KPIs through the funnel.

On an informational page, if you have that user come to the page, read the information, and then just present them with an email signup form, they’re probably going to leave. The information would have to be really fantastic for them to drop an email address. For the white papers that you see in SaaS, sometimes there’s enough of a lead-in that they will. For most folks, though, that email opt-in gets passed up.

Tune your click-through rates in PPC and SEO, not for the raw clicks from those platforms, but to the CTAs that are priming users to submit their email addresses once they get to those pages.

There was a study years ago which showed that messaging in paid search that was optimized for raw CTR wasn’t as effective at driving email signups as optimizing that language for the email signup itself. You’d have a slightly lower click-through rate from PPC, but the sign-ups would be higher, and finding that equilibrium was really effective. If you can do it for PPC, you can do it for SEO as well.

That’s one of the great projects that can kick off these initiatives because it’s something that involves everybody and you’re going to get a net yield that benefits everyone.”

Can an omnichannel approach assist with discoverability in AI-powered results?

“Simply by being a great omnichannel marketer, you’re going to generate the things that will naturally influence AI and LLMs over time.

Perplexity has been open about the fact that they look at backlinks as a means of testing trust. We know that some of these places are striking data deals. I believe Perplexity had a deal with Yelp for location data services so, if you do local-focused searches, you’re going to mostly see Yelp pages as a result.

You have the ability to influence those things as an omnichannel marketer. If your omnichannel strategy is partly built on driving a higher volume of higher-quality reviews to platforms like Yelp, those will be surfaced in Perplexity. However, you didn’t do it for Perplexity. You did it as part of a cohesive strategy that allows you to be everywhere at once.

When you do all the things that omnichannel does – shoring up strategy, messaging, and branding across all of these channels – you’ll naturally influence the LLMs by creating these assets.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“This year, in particular, it feels like everything’s on fire and it’s impossible to put anything down. The best tip I have is to stop chasing the shiny things. In the past year and a half, SEOs have been presented with so many shiny objects: AI and LLMs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, etc. Mike King’s been on a tear with some of his absolutely fantastic technical SEO around those topics.

However, the time required to get up to speed on, understand, and execute those skills at the necessary level to be effective, is so high. You could do this twenty times over before you get good enough. With omnichannel marketing, you will have bigger returns because you’re not focused on just one or two platforms.

Put the shiny things away. Read and stay abreast of the news, but you don’t have to learn how to program an LLM or dive deep into machine learning to be an effective SEO in 2025.”

Joshua Squires is Associate Director of SEO at Amsive, and you can find him over at Joshua-Squires.com.