SEO is marketing

Being an SEO can be a lonely line of work.

Getting traction in SEO means working across the business. You need enough understanding of what other teams do to see where your work fits, whether that's content, engineering, PR, brand, UX, analytics… the list keeps growing.

It puts us in a slightly unusual position. Our work spans many teams, yet we might be the only SEO in the business. We need to understand their world, while finding ways to explain ours to other specialists and senior leaders.

Have you seen that video of two AI agents talking to one another, then switching from English to electronic noises? I sometimes wonder if that's what two SEOs sound like to everyone else.

Rankings, referring domains, AI citations, Core Web Vitals. These mean something to us, but they don't necessarily tell a senior leader how our work helps the business grow.

It comes back to why we do SEO in the first place. We are predominantly a marketing function. We're paid, and often paid fairly well, to help a business drive revenue and growth through search.

01How brands grow

I'm not claiming to have the full picture, but one book that fundamentally changed the way I think about search is Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow. And it doesn't even have a chapter on SEO!

The book draws on decades of research into buying behaviour, with patterns tested across countries and categories. It brought that evidence into everyday marketing practice, challenging some deeply held beliefs about growth.

One controversial argument challenged retention as the main engine of growth: the research puts reaching more buyers at the centre. Mental and physical availability help explain how a brand reaches those buyers and gets bought.

01

Mental availability

Be remembered.

How easily someone thinks of or recognises your brand in a buying situation.

02

Physical availability

Be there to buy.

Whether your product or service is available and easy to buy when that situation comes around.

Coca-Cola is my go-to example. Its advertising helps keep the brand in people's minds. Its distribution network gets the product onto shelves. You can walk into a supermarket or corner shop knowing exactly which drink you want, but if Coke isn't there, you physically can't buy it from that shop.

02Where search fits

For me, this helps explain why search can be so effective: it creates opportunities to build both mental and physical (well, digital) availability.

Take a brand selling running shoes. Its blog content can engage people researching their first race or choosing shoes for different terrain. Each visit is an opportunity to put the brand's name and logo in front of them, creating and reinforcing memory structures that connect the brand with running; This exploratory-level influence is becoming increasingly more important in the era of AI-powered search.

Cover that subject well and your brand can keep appearing as people explore it. The brand becomes familiar. That familiarity, tied to a relevant need, gives it a better chance of coming to mind and being chosen when someone buys.

Then comes the moment of purchase. Someone searches for 'buy running shoes'. They're in market, actively looking to buy. Being at the top of those results is the SEO equivalent of being on the shelf: your product is there when they're shopping, with a route to purchase. That's digital availability in practice.

03Putting this into practice

These ideas also give us a better way to explain our work. A content programme can help more potential buyers know and remember the brand. Improving visibility for purchase searches can put products in front of people ready to buy. The metrics help us track progress, and this explains why that progress matters to the business.

We're marketers first, specialising in SEO. Understanding the underlying drivers of growth helps us recognise where search can contribute most.

That understanding also makes us more adaptable. SEOs are used to decoding how a channel works. We can apply that same thinking to whichever channel offers the best opportunity for growth. A mature SEO can look at the mix of channels, and their relative ROI opportunity and say earnestly, 'You know what, SEO isn't the right channel for us here.'

Spend time with your brand team and the people running other channels. Understand where the business's growth is coming from and what it's trying to achieve next. Then work out together where search can add the most value. That might mean helping potential customers become familiar with the brand, or making sure your products appear when a campaign gets people searching. The better you understand how the whole business grows, the clearer it becomes where search can make the biggest difference.

Note: This article is an adaptation of my talk from Shenzhen SEO Conference 2026.