SEO
Customer journey SEO: four businesses, four journeys
The same SEO advice is wrong for three of these four businesses. Four mapped buying journeys, plus sixteen months of real data from a property I own.
The same advice produces four different answers for four different businesses, which is why a universal search strategy is bad advice to at least three of them.
Anyone writing about this subject writes from their own market, and most of us are in B2B software, so most of the advice assumes a long research cycle with a validate step in the middle. Apply that shape to an impulse purchase or an emergency plumber and it is not slightly off. It is backwards.
The same lesson, four completely different answers
Four businesses, four journey shapes, four different first surfaces. Read the shape rather than the platform names, then look at what I would refuse to fund for each one.
A five-person team choosing project management software
- 1 ChatGPT Discover A shortlist of four, with reasons
- 2 Google Understand Detail on the two that sounded plausible
- 3 YouTube Compare To watch somebody actually use the thing
- 4 G2 and Reddit Validate Whether the support is as bad as they suspect
- 5 Your website Act Pricing that does not require a sales call
Why the shape is what it is Five surfaces, one buyer, and the two that decided it are ones you do not own. This is the journey that makes people think SEO stopped working, because four of the five steps are invisible in their analytics.
What I would not fund for this business Pinterest, TikTok, Maps. There is no visual discovery moment and there is no address.
Somebody deciding where to eat in forty minutes
- 1 Google Maps Discover Open now, close by, not terrible
- 2 Reviews Validate Recent reviews, and photos that are not the menu
- 3 Instagram Compare What the room actually looks like tonight
- 4 Maps again Act Directions, and whether to book
Why the shape is what it is Four steps, all of them mobile, all of them inside about six minutes. The whole journey happens on two surfaces you can fix in an afternoon.
What I would not fund for this business ChatGPT, LinkedIn, long-form blogging. I have watched restaurants spend a year on a blog that could not have changed a single one of these four steps.
Somebody who saw a jacket they liked
- 1 TikTok Discover To see it on a person, not on a model
- 2 Instagram Compare Other people wearing it, other colors
- 3 Google Validate Whether the brand ships and whether returns work
- 4 A marketplace Act The size in stock, today
Why the shape is what it is Discovery is visual and it is not on a search engine. Web search only enters the journey at the validate step, which is the opposite of the SaaS shape and the reason one strategy cannot serve both.
What I would not fund for this business G2, documentation, LinkedIn. Nobody compares jackets on a software review site.
Somebody who needs a habit tracker
- 1 Google or an assistant Discover What the good ones are called
- 2 YouTube Understand To see the interface before installing anything
- 3 App Store Compare Screenshots, the subtitle, the rating
- 4 App Store reviews Validate Whether the paywall is where they think it is
- 5 App Store Act Install
Why the shape is what it is Three of the five steps happen inside one store listing, on fields most teams write once and never test. The store is the funnel, and the website is a formality.
What I would not fund for this business Almost all blogging. If you have an app and a blog and thirty hours a month, the store listing and two YouTube walkthroughs will beat the blog.
Look at the first surface in each one
An assistant, then Maps, then TikTok, then a general search. Four different starting surfaces, which means four different discovery investments, which means the phrase “start with SEO” is only correct for one of them and only if you read SEO broadly.
And look at the last two
Every journey ends on something you own or something you control the content of, and every journey has a brand search somewhere near the end. That convergence is the reason the website did not stop mattering when discovery moved.
The first of those four is the shape I work in most, and I have written the channel version of it separately in SaaS SEO.
One journey with real numbers attached
Four archetypes are useful and none of them is anybody’s real data, so here is one that is. This is a property I own, over sixteen months, with the exports published.
One of my own properties, not an archetype
What this looks like on a real site
SEOTamil.com is a deliberately small 26-page Tamil-language site I own. Two surfaces, worked properly, over sixteen months to August 2026. Every figure below is a published export on the case study page, and the property is named so you can go and check the live results yourself.
Category
Personal branding · Search Everywhere Optimization
#1
Google for “SEO Tamil”
222
Queries in the top 3
5,260
Google AI feature impressions
336
Bing Copilot citations
Which of the six surfaces it actually covers
- Web search Google and Bing organic
- AI search Google AI Overview and Bing Copilot
- Video search Out of scope for this property
- Community search Not worked, and not claimed
- Commerce and reviews No product to list
- Local and app search No address, no app
Two of six, and that is the finding rather than a gap in the work. A 26-page site with no product, no address and no app has no business on the other four, and the queries it wins are queries where being the clearest Tamil-language answer is the whole advantage. Chapter six is this table, argued.
The full case study, with the Search Console and Bing exports
How to use this
Map your own before you spend anything. The framework behind these four is five search jobs paired against six surfaces, and it is in search everywhere optimization, step one of the SEO roadmap. Once the map exists, search intent is where you take it query by query.
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