SEO and the Customer Journey

If you’re a website owner, there’s almost no chance you’ve gone through an entire week without having at least one SEO specialist contacting you. I’ve been a specialist for many years now and I’ve never had to do outreach because that’s what being a good specialist does. It’s our job to bring people to websites organically, rather than relying on email campaigns and hatchet job marketing. Anyone who has a team of 500 SEO experts as many of them allege should not ever have to reach out to businesses through cold email marketing.

So What Exactly is SEO?

SEO is Search Engine Optimisation, it’s the process of making your website appear in the search results of standard search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing. SEO takes many things into account from the words written on a page or a blog post like this, to the speed and accessibility of your website. From the pictures your company uses to the internal links on your website and the external links pointing to you.

So Why Does SEO Matter?

SEO is all about accessibility. If a customer cannot find your website, then your business is harder for them to access. A non-optimised website will become lost in the morass of sprawling websites cluttered across the net. So once your website is optimised at least to a modest degree, it will be much easier for customers to find you. 

This helps with the customer journey – a vital part of running your company effectively.

How the Customer Journey and SEO Work Together to Drive Growth

In modern marketing, I’ve personally found that two concepts often dominate conversations: the customer journey and search engine optimisation (SEO). At first glance, they may seem like separate domains, one being entirely focused on the human experience, the other on algorithms and rankings. Yet if we take a moment to step back and look at it, you may well notice that SEO and the customer journey are not just related, they are deeply intertwined. Understanding how they work together can transform how your brand attracts, engages, and retains customers. Which is not just cool, it’s highly effective as a marketing strategy.

Understanding the Customer Journey

The customer journey maps the stages a potential buyer passes through, from initial awareness of a brand to post-purchase advocacy. While models vary, most frameworks divide the journey into five stages:

• Awareness: The customer becomes aware of a problem or need.
• Consideration: The customer researches solutions and evaluates options.
• Decision: They select a product or service.
• Retention: They continue to use the product and interact with the brand.
• Advocacy: Satisfied customers recommend the brand to others.

Each stage represents a unique opportunity for engagement, but only if the right content is available at the right time. That’s where SEO comes in. 

Stage 1: Awareness – Making the First Impression

The awareness stage is the entry point to the customer journey. Potential customers may not know your brand exists, but they are actively searching for solutions to their problems. Effective SEO ensures that your content appears in those searches, increasing visibility. It’s really important to me for example that when someone types in Vani Malik Consulting to the Google search bar that our business comes up. If it doesn’t and they’re looking for us, I am failing the business as an SEO expert. Good SEO means we will show up for a wide variety of consulting search terms, hence the reason I and my business partner write blogs like this. But most people should at least have their website at number one when people are directly looking for them. Otherwise that’s crushingly bad for business. 

At the awareness stage, informational content is key. Blog posts, how-to guides, explainer videos, and infographics can capture attention and position your brand as an authority. SEO is in itself a morass of chaos, meaning it’s highly unlikely this blog will ever show up specifically for Search Engine Optimisation!

Optimising blog posts, guides and explainers for the right keywords, especially problem-focused terms rather than branded searches, ensures that your audience finds you and your content when they need you most. I’ve actually written a guide “Blogging Course for Beginners” in which I detail a lot of information on how to blog – and do it well. 

Quick Rundown on How The SEO Works For You: 

• Blog content containing localised information to be noticed in a specific location (geotargeting) with information about your business, for example: “Vani Malik Consulting is a business consulting firm based in the Colchester area – this contains local location information, business information and keywords and a slightly awkward long tail keyword.
• Infographics and pictures that have alt text so that search engines can easily identify them as relevant, even though some of the technology can pick up what an image is just by scanning it, such as Google’s Gemini AI.
• Fast loading websites are preferred by a lot of crawlers which means that you benefit from a little work optimising image content on your website, and this also makes your site much nicer for customers to use. This is part of User Experience or as we call it UX… Never did I ever think I’d end up being trendy.

There are many other little bits and bobs in my other blog that you might find helpful but I’m getting sidetracked!

Stage 2: Consideration – Educating and Nurturing

Once awareness is established, the customer enters the consideration stage. Here, they actively evaluate options and seek information to make informed decisions. The goal for marketers is to provide content that addresses questions, demonstrates expertise, and differentiates your solution.

SEO plays a critical role by ensuring that content is discoverable and structured in a way that guides the customer. Case studies, product comparisons, detailed guides, and FAQs are all effective. Internal linking strategies help visitors navigate from educational content to product or service pages seamlessly.

At this stage, search intent becomes essential. Users are no longer asking, “What is X?” but “Which solution is best for my problem?” By aligning your content with these queries, SEO supports the customer journey while moving prospects closer to a purchase decision.

Stage 3: Decision – Converting Interest into Action

The decision stage is where marketing meets sales – (I love this part!) Customers are ready to commit, and your content must answer final questions and reduce friction. Landing pages, product descriptions, pricing pages, and reviews optimised for SEO ensure that your brand is visible in search results when purchase intent is high.

Optimising content for conversion-focused queries like “best [product type] for [specific problem]” aligns SEO with business objectives. Technical SEO, including fast page load times, mobile optimisation, and structured data, also plays a critical role in reducing barriers to purchase.

Remember how I indicated that fast loading websites were useful? This will help your customers on their journey from finding you to purchase! (Slow bulky images that aren’t well optimised will destroy your ranking and lead to poor user experiences, ultimately costing a company sales.

Stage 4: Retention – Supporting Ongoing Engagement

The customer journey doesn’t end at the sale. Retention involves providing value post-purchase to encourage continued use and satisfaction. SEO contributes by making support content easily discoverable.

Instructional guides, troubleshooting articles, knowledge bases, and community forums optimised for search ensure that customers can quickly find answers. This reduces frustration, increases satisfaction, and lowers churn. Retention-focused SEO also positions your brand as a trusted partner, increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases, and nothing is quite as golden as to have a plethora of customers recommending you because, let’s be honest, you’re the best! (You must be if you’re reading this!) This is where we get to advocacy!

Stage 5: Advocacy – Turning Customers into Brand Ambassadors

Satisfied customers can drive new awareness and consideration through reviews, testimonials, and social sharing. SEO amplifies this effect by making user-generated content discoverable.

Encouraging reviews on high-authority platforms and optimising testimonial pages for search can improve both visibility and credibility. In this way, advocacy becomes a self-reinforcing loop: happy customers generate content that attracts new prospects, feeding the awareness stage and restarting the journey.

How SEO and the Customer Journey Work Together

When integrated effectively, SEO and the customer journey create a seamless experience that guides prospects from awareness to advocacy. So how do the points of the customer journey we looked at earlier add up?

• Awareness: SEO ensures potential customers discover your content.
• Consideration: SEO-optimised educational content nurtures informed decision-making.
• Decision: SEO drives visibility for conversion-focused content, facilitating purchases.
• Retention: SEO improves discoverability of support and instructional content.
• Advocacy: SEO amplifies user-generated content, increasing brand credibility and reach.

Without alignment between SEO and the customer journey, marketing efforts risk inefficiency. Brands may attract traffic that never converts or fail to retain loyal customers due to poor content visibility.

Best Practices for Aligning SEO with the Customer Journey

• Map Keywords to Stages: Identify search terms that correspond to each stage of the journey. Awareness-stage keywords differ from decision-stage queries.
• Develop Stage-Specific Content: Create content tailored to the needs of your audience at each stage.
• Optimise for Search Intent: Ensure content addresses the questions and goals of the user, whether informational, navigational, or transactional.
• Leverage Technical SEO: Fast loading times, mobile-friendly design, and structured data improve user experience and search rankings.
• Use Analytics to Refine: Track engagement metrics to identify gaps in the journey and adjust SEO strategies accordingly.

The customer journey and SEO are not separate marketing initiatives as one might first believe, they are complementary forces. SEO ensures that the right content reaches the right people at the right time, supporting the customer journey from awareness to advocacy.

Brands that integrate SEO with a customer-centric approach enjoy higher visibility, better engagement, increased conversions, and stronger customer loyalty. In short, SEO is not just a tool for attracting traffic, it is a strategic enabler of the entire customer experience.