Spend your time where your audience spends theirs

Ebere says: “With the way things are going, it’s almost impossible to lay your hand on a specific tip.

Aside from the classic advice of allowing your sites to be crawlable and indexable so that your website can be found, every SEO should focus on spending as much time as possible where their targeted audience is spending the most of their time.”

How do you decide who the target audience is and how do you find out where they’re spending most of the time?

“By doing social listening, and sometimes I try to imagine that I am the target audience. If I am the target audience for a fashion brand, let’s say, what would I be looking for at this time? Where will I be going to search for it?

Right now, I’m not a fashionista and I’m not very good at fashion, and I spend time on TikTok watching videos on how people are styling their dresses and their bags, and seeing how they are combining them. I love watching those videos because this is something I am not really good at. I wouldn’t go to Google to search for that. I wouldn’t go to Google to search for how to combine pieces because I don’t even know what to combine.

As a target audience for this type of brand, I spend most of my time on TikTok watching videos. In that way, I try to become the target consumer.”

What if you’re not as representative of the target consumer as you would like to be?

“If you are not (which is also possible), then you can do social listening and audience research. That’s what we do, as SEOs, when we are looking for content to write. We do audience research. We look for what our audience is searching for and the keywords they are searching with.

For this, though, you are not looking for their keywords. You are looking at where they are spending their time during your audience research.”

How do you know where to start looking?

“That’s where it gets even more interesting. For me, I would just say that you should build your strategy across every channel and see the kind of traffic you get from there.

Let’s say you get the most traffic from YouTube. That means your audience is spending more time on YouTube. If you are getting more traffic on Instagram, TikTok, through email marketing, or Google, that means your audience is spending more time on that platform.

Build a strategy across all channels and see where your audience is spending most of the time.

If you find that most of your traffic is coming from YouTube, then you can start optimizing to get more traffic from YouTube to hit your website, and also build that audience so they can get to know your brand better.

Most people go on YouTube to search for content. If you made a YouTube video for a fashion brand about combining different fashion elements, and then someone watched that video, they are interested in it. If you are selling an earring that was featured in the video, it’s easy to carry that person over from YouTube to your website.

That is an example of optimizing for a particular channel and then directing the traffic to your website from that channel.”

You’re a fan of digital experience optimization. What is that and why is it important?

“Most SEOs are hell-bent on ranking on Google. With everything happening right now, it’s almost impossible for us to get the conversion that our clients expect from us. With all of the AI overviews, chatbots, and even SearchGPT coming out, it’s bringing down the search estate and it’s almost impossible for us to get the conversion that our clients need.

Therefore, it makes sense for us to look beyond search engines and look at serving our audience on the different digital platforms where they are. Digital experience optimization is about offering your audience great digital experience wherever they are.”

Why do you believe that focusing on conversions is better than focusing on rankings?

“You should be focusing on conversion because this is what your clients need. Whatever conversion means for them – sign-ups, bookings, leads, etc. – that is what they are interested in. Instead of just spending time looking for keywords with high search volumes to rank for, it makes sense for us to start thinking about how we convert for our clients.

If you notice that you are dropping off in Google or you are no longer converting there as you would like to, you want to look for other channels where you could get these conversions and these leads.

Focusing on conversions is the bulk of SEO. Our job is to convert for our clients, whatever conversion means for them. I was reading the history of SEO, and I learned that in the 1990s (before my time), SEO was all about trying to get businesses on the Yellow Pages and other directories where their audience would find them when they were looking.

Then, Google came along, and that became where your audience was going to find you.

Our core job is to get people to convert; to get people to find our clients, get people who are looking for them to find them, and get them to do what they want them to do on the site. If you are not converting, and you are just ranking, you’re not succeeding.”

Is ‘SEO’ an old-fashioned term because it doesn’t necessarily encompass everything that an SEO should do?

“Shout out to the people who coined the name (I wasn’t there), but the title is kind of restrictive. It makes people think that SEO is just about Google and ranking on Google.

I am trying to use the term ‘digital experience optimization’ because it goes beyond just Google. You need to make sure you are offering your audience a good digital experience that will make them convert.”

If you’re trying to optimize in lots of different places, how do you measure the success of that?

“When you’re optimizing for places like YouTube or socials, it’s likely that you won’t easily find a metric that lets you attribute who came from which platform. However, when you start noticing your branded query search increasing, and you notice that people are searching for your brand more often than usual, that’s an indication that you are converting users from these other channels.

Most of the time, when I watch a TikTok video, I don’t click on the website immediately. When I need the product, I search for the brand name. I remember what I saw on TikTok and then I go and search on Google. When you notice that your branded terms are getting more traffic, that is an indication.

You can also check your referred pages in your analytics to see whether people are getting referred to your websites from any other channels. That’s another way to measure this traffic.”

Is increasing branded searches the future of SEO?

“I think increasing brand awareness is part of SEO because, if I know a certain brand and fall in love with that brand, when I need whatever they’re offering, I’ll immediately go for that brand.

That’s part of SEO, and part of why we should change the term and make it less restrictive.”

How do you create a digital experience optimization strategy?

“We sit down with our clients around twice a year. We start with Google and look at whether we’re going to get more traffic and conversions by adding another platform like a TikTok channel or an Instagram.

I have a client who was focusing on Google alone. Then we decided that we should try to add YouTube and Instagram. She saw a massive increase in traffic from Instagram, in particular. People are really interested in watching you say those words instead of writing them as content.

We chose Instagram because we saw that their competitors were on Instagram as well, so it was likely that the audience would be there. When you look at the competitors, you are going to see the type of audience that is commenting and liking. You are going to see how they are interacting with that competitor.

It’s important to analyse the competition. In traditional SEO, you do keyword research, you do competitor analysis, and you do gap analysis to see what the competitors are doing that you are not doing, but could use to catch up or even beat them. You do the same thing when you’re trying to target other channels.

You look at what the competitors are doing that you are not doing, and then what more you can offer that will make the audience choose you over them.”

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?

“In 2025, you shouldn’t spend much time trying to print content for Google and rank for high-volume keywords.

Instead, look at the content you already have on your website and your blog, and see how you can repurpose this content on other channels so that you can bring in an audience who is now searching and spending more time in those other channels.

Your competitors are already taking them away, you just don’t know it yet.”

Ebere Cecilia Jonathan is a Freelance SEO Consultant, and you can find her over at SearchAfriCon.com.