Focus Beyond the Website: Shifting from Google Clicks to Multi-Platform Discovery - Sara Warneryd

I feel like we as SEOers need to broaden our strategy a bit.

I want us to see search as something broader and more of a discovery channel and not just focusing on the website, as I feel like we have been doing for many years.

The user buyer journey is now more fragmented than it has been before.

We have new social channels emerging.

We have the LLMs.

We have so many new ways of interacting with the web, uh, and I feel like we need to be in those places where your audience actually spends time.

Basically, what I want us to do is to be a part of the wider discussions that you have within the organization.

I want us to be a part of discussion with PR, with brand, with social channels, and start unifying the strategy across the organization, ensuring that we are optimizing for the places where the relevant target audience spends their time and not only doing a one-fit-all strategy like we've been used to optimizing for the historical or traditional blue links on Google.

Absolutely.

I remember, I think, for the Majestic, um, I think it was a SEO in 2025 series, I was advocating contemplating changing the name of [laughs] SEO to ODO, Organic Discovery Optimization, um, where you're giving consumers different platforms on which they will discover you, and you're trying to optimize for those platforms, wh- which isn't, of course, just Google.

But we're, we're still talking about organic search, but not necessarily even search.

It's organic discoveries.

They're discovering a brand.

Uh, should I be [laughs] revisiting that conversation, or does that not really cover everything that you're talking about?

I like it a lot, so I agree with that approach.

And I feel like it's so important to have this shift of mindset because I feel like a lot of the times it gets forgotten.

Like, a lot of the discussions I have with SEO, I work at an agency, so I'm a consultant for different clients, and I feel like many people believe that SEO is just this simple task where you optimize headings and meta description.

But we have to remember that it's broader, and especially in this new era of search that we're in.

We see that, like, first of all, zero-click searches are emerging.

Like, it is a fact that we will probably see less and less traffic coming into your site.

But that doesn't mean that people is not doing the research still.

People are still, like, discussing your topic somewhere.

We just need to ensure that we are active on those places where the audience actually spends their time, and that can be, like, different depending on what industry you're in.

Like, if you're in B2B, those areas might be Capterra, G2, like, review platforms.

It can be LinkedIn, of course.