Adapt to the changing role of SEO

Emina says: “Don’t get too hung up on ‘SEO’ and think about how the role is changing in 2025.

Whether you call it SEO, SXO, or OSO, the role of SEO needs to change. You need to understand and utilise wider digital and multi-channel marketing to succeed.”

What is OSO?

“OSO stands for Organic Search Optimization and Valentina Stragliotto spoke about it at brightonSEO, in relation to Gen Z, YouTube, TikTok, and things like that.

I’ve been in the industry for over 10 years, and I don’t think it’s a generational thing. We should be thinking about digital marketing, not just search engine optimization. Part of the reason why we get into a muddle when we’re showing our results is because we’re only focused on stuff like traffic and ranking.

Actually, you should be focusing on business value and business results. As soon as you put that in, you need to have a wider understanding. You have to have an understanding of analytics, omnichannel, etc. It’s much more complex when you bring in the impact for the businesses.”

Is SEO changing or do SEOs just need to work more closely with other channels?

“The role of SEO is changing. Think about how SEO has been in the last year alone, and what’s been happening in digital marketing more broadly. For example, while it’s a myth that the user journey has ever been linear, it’s now less linear than ever. Even in e-commerce, you have two touchpoints before you actually buy anything.

The other side is privacy. These days attribution is almost impossible. I’d argue that it was never accurate before; it was just guessing. Now, though, it’s even more guesswork because everything is based on modelling, and modelling without data is very flawed.

When you look at where Google is going and what is going on with them these days, you have new SERPs, new features, the rise of Reddit, Perspectives (which will now be Forums), the fact that video search is stronger than ever, etc. There’s a difference between SEO for YouTube and SEO for Google, and there shouldn’t be. You should know both of those things and understand how it all works together.

The role of an SEO has become much wider than it has ever been. It’s no longer about just aligning the channels. We’re not only talking about making sure that your paid channels sing from the same song sheet as your SEO. We’re talking about the blending of these channels, even inside the SERPs.”

Can you still build a picture of an average user and use that to build a content strategy around different channels?

“You can, but it depends on the amount of data that you have. For an enterprise company, data modelling is brilliant because they have so much data for the models to learn from. It becomes more difficult when you are a small company that doesn’t have a lot of data. It doesn’t make sense, statistically, if you’re making decisions based on 2 conversions a month.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be using that data. You should be using that data. However, particularly for small and medium businesses, this is where the other complexity comes in. We always say that it should be about the customers, and yet customer research isn’t something that many companies actually do and come to us with.

As an agency, a company comes to you and they want to rank on Google, but they don’t come in with a bunch of market research around their customers, which immediately puts you on the wrong foot. If you don’t have the data to feed into the models, you don’t have the market research, and you don’t have customer insights, then it’s incredibly difficult.

As an SEO, you need to be able to say that to the client. You need to be able to say what data you do have and where the gaps are, and you need to be able to talk about how you can fill in those gaps. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen, and you’re not always paid for it. People just want you to get them the rankings, traffic, and conversions. It’s difficult for a small or medium-sized company to invest in that first piece, which is super important.”

How do other channels like Reddit and YouTube fit into the customer journey and what kind of content do users engage with?

“It really does depend on the platform, your customer, and what they’re looking for. The idea of intent also works on YouTube, TikTok, and other channels as well, because people are using it as a search engine. They’re not search engines, but people are using them as such.

My advice would be to map out your customer journey – that’s really important – and there isn’t one standard customer journey. You need to think about who your customer is, who your buying committee is, and who these people that you’re engaging with are.

Consider the different personas, but not in terms of creating the typical profiles that don’t really give you anything. Instead, you should be thinking in detail about where they are, what conversations they’re having on these platforms, and what they’re interested in – and trying to predict what their next step is.

If people are coming to Google after they’ve seen a social media post, what would they search for there? Would they be putting in your brand or something else? Is there a moment in your customer journey where social media is not enough, so they switch to Google? Then, what will they search after? The next search that they’re going to perform is something that you should be thinking about when creating your content.

You should consider different user journeys for different personas, and you should have a firm idea of who you’re targeting and what they’re likely to engage with on the different channels. We do that quite a lot.

If our clients have personas, we’ll have a look at those and rip them apart. If they’re a SaaS company, recording and listening to their demos is an incredible data source. We’ll do the same with customer calls. Then, we’ll get them into a room to build the user journeys for these personas in a way that will feed into their content on the website and on social media.

It’s about how you can use this information, within your digital marketing universe, to get people in.”

Is the goal of content on other platforms to get them to remember your brand so that they will search for it on Google?

“Part of it is brand awareness. It’s the age-old conversation of branded versus non-branded keywords, topics, etc.

Some of it is going to be thinking about what the next commercial search is going to be. If somebody isn’t looking for something informational on TikTok or YouTube, are there any commercial searches connected to that which might take place on Google?

Maybe there aren’t. Maybe the commercial searches are staying on TikTok and YouTube. That’s something that an SEO should be thinking about.”

Is it necessary for every SEO to be aware of these platforms and how they operate, or can a technical SEO stay focused on the technical aspects of a website?

“That’s a really hard question. I stayed in digital marketing for a reason. I didn’t want to specialise because I’m very curious and I’m interested in everything.

Technical is a bit tricky because it’s so complex and wide, and it depends on the size of the website. It needs extremely particular expertise that you develop over years and years of practice, so it’s a very specialised role.

I think they need to have some understanding of the wider digital marketing landscape in terms of why they are doing this. One of the things that happens with technical, more than in any other type of SEO, is a disconnect between technical fixes/tasks and the business. That’s why people are always asking, ‘What’s the impact of that?’ and ‘Why should we do this technical fix?’

Understanding that gives you an advantage. Whether you go and actually do that is up to you. Whether you have to do it will depend on who you work with. For us, we hire people who are specialised but also understand the wider environment that technical sits in.

I personally think you should have at least one T-shaped marketer in your business. Whether you’re an agency or you’re in-house, you have to have somebody who can bring things together. I’m not saying everybody needs to be like that but, considering the changes that have happened in the last year, there needs to be more emphasis on at least having somebody in the team who’s like that, because otherwise it just won’t work these days.”

With so many changes and new opportunities, how does an SEO stay on top of things without stretching themselves too thinly?

“I’m probably the wrong person to ask considering I sit on LinkedIn at 6 AM because I really love my job. I spend a lot of time reading and it is tough. Not everybody is going to want to do that.

What has helped me a lot is communities. I am part of the Women in Tech SEO community, for example. It’s brilliant for keeping up to date. You don’t have to go to everything and follow every channel, but it’s a really good place for following the important updates.

As we know, there are a bunch of resources online, and the more you work in the industry, the more you can discern where you go for those updates and what websites can be trusted and do the work. It’s not always those that rank number 1 on Google, which is something that you learn as you go through your career.”

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?

“You can stop worrying about certain things. One example would be 404 pages. That completely ticks me off. There’s always been this obsession with 404 pages when they are very much part of the normal internet experience.

There are cases when you do need to worry about them. If you have backlinks from pages and you don’t want to lose the value of those, then worry about them. However, spending hours mapping out 404 pages without understanding why is a complete waste of time.

There are meta descriptions as well. They’re great for clicks, but even these days that’s questionable because Google is always messing around with them.

There are a few of these individual tasks where people waste a lot of time, like link building outreach. Stop wasting time on that because it just doesn’t work. There are agencies that are spending a lot of time sending cold emails to blogs asking them to include links. That might have worked 10 years ago, but it doesn’t work these days.

Think about what you’re doing and where you’re spending your time, then try and shave that down. Also, make sure you’re putting in the time for training and education. Be very strict with yourself and put in some time to make sure you’re up to date with things.”

Emina Demiri-Watson is Head of Digital Marketing at Vixen Digital, and you can find her over at VixenDigital.com.