How does adding coordinates to the EXIF data affect local rank? Our team wanted to find out. That’s why we recently conducted a 10-week study on the effects of geotagging for local rank.
The geotagged images seemed to only affect the ranking for “near me” queries in the areas the EXIF data coordinates specified. Their impact on those queries in those areas was positive and statistically significant.
However, the study also found that queries that mentioned specific towns saw a decrease in ranking during the same period.
In other words, when EXIF data targeted Salt Lake City, Utah, the query [lawn care near me] saw a significant increase in rank.
For the same targeted area, the query for [lawn care salt lake city utah] saw, on average, decreases in rank.
The geotagging debate
SEOs have argued for years about whether adding coordinates to image EXIF data (known as geotagging) affects a business’s Google Business Profiles (GBP) rank.
The theory is that if a business owner or customer takes a photo from their phone and uploads it to a GBP, Google reviews the EXIF (metadata) of that image and uses the location of where it was taken as a ranking signal.
Phones automatically use location details to input EXIF data on each photo taken from the device.
It’s speculated that Google uses the EXIF location data before stripping it.
On the surface, it makes sense.
However, skeptics don’t believe Google does this. This is because this data can easily be manipulated using any free EXIF editor.
Google’s John Mueller said it was unnecessary for SEO purposes, two years ago on Reddit.
“No need to geotag images for SEO.”
Mueller also told me he didn’t know much about what GBPs do, in February on Bluesky.
Joy Hawkins, owner and president of local SEO agency Sterling Sky, performed a test on this in January 2024. She tested five GBP locations and saw no measurable increases over several weeks.
A month later, consultant Tim Kahlert, CEO of Hypetrix, performed a test. He also concluded that “this tactic currently has no effect on local rankings.”
These tests were better than nothing, but still weren’t enough. Plus, the sample sizes of the locations tested were quite small.
Those who say geotagging works never post their data or case studies, only offering anecdotal evidence.
Geotaggers aren’t publishing their tests and skeptics aren’t conducting them at scale. Google flip-flopping on their position doesn’t help either.
It was time this test was done justice.
Methodology and testing
Our test included 27 of our lawn care business clients. All SEO efforts were paused for the sole purpose of this test.
Every week on Tuesday and Thursday, we would post a client-owned image to their GBP (two images per week).
We then selected two towns in their service area grid that needed improvement. We based these on a baseline report taken from Local Falcon at the beginning of the test period. We kept these towns moderately far apart to avoid any kind of bleedover.
In this example, we might have selected “Little Falls” and “Garrisonville.”
During the test period, coordinates would be added to the EXIF data of the images. On Tuesday’s image, we’d add the center of Little Falls. On Thursday’s image, we’d add the center of Garrisonville.
We ran a report, monitored position changes, and charted them, every week
For each location, we tracked three keywords. Following the example above, we tracked:
“Lawn care garrisonville”
“Lawn care little falls”
“Lawn care near me”
For [lawn care near me] we monitored how it affected position changes in both of the target towns.
The control period
Establishing a proper control period was crucial.
The control period had to run for the same duration as the test period (five weeks). To establish consistency and isolate variables, we:
Maintained the image posting schedule. This ensured adding images on different days didn’t influence rank.
Stripped all EXIF data to ensure the only variables in the test period were the coordinates.
Monitored the same keywords to set a baseline.
Paused all SEO efforts for all 27 locations.
We continued as normal when the control period ended. The only change was adding town #1’s coordinates to Tuesday’s image and town #2’s coordinates to Thursday’s image.
Findings
Most of what we found validated the skeptics’ statements. But that doesn’t mean we ignored the geotaggers.
Service + city
In our example, when images were geotagged with their coordinates, both Garrisonville and Little Falls saw decreases in rank for “lawn care garrisonville” and “lawn care little falls.”
The conclusion? Geotagging had no impact whatsoever.
Service + near me
This one surprised me – and it had statistical significance. Garrisonville and Little Falls saw an overall increase in rank for [lawn care near me] queries.
Service + near me (CoA)
Local Falcon also produces reports on Center of Business Address. This monitors the rank of your target keywords where the business pin is actually located.
The end result: EXIF data had no effect on the business’s actual location for “near me” queries. Ranking dropped a lot more when EXIF data was added to the images targeting different areas.
Service + city (ATRP)
Average Total Rank Position is the average position in the target area. This is seen if only adding images targeting those two areas affects the rest of the service area.
The end result: There was no impact. When EXIF data was added for the full-service areas, the average rank of those areas decreased further.
Service + near me (ATRP)
The “near me” queries for ATRP yielded the same result as above.
No impact, yet rankings plummeted further with geotagging.
Service + city (SoLV)
Share of Local Voice is another metric Local Falcon tracks. It shows how often a location shows in the top 3 positions of the map pack for the target queries.
The results started to deviate from Center of Address and ATRP reports. However, not by much.
The final result was that geotagged images had no impact. However, this time, the ranking didn’t continue to plummet during the test period.
Service + near me (SoLV)
We had the same results with “near me” queries on both images as we did with the [service] + [city] queries.
Geotagged images had no impact here.
Final thoughts
Out of the seven metrics we looked at:
Only one saw an improvement.
Six had no impact.
Of those six, four of them saw a decrease in rank when images were geotagged
The last five metrics focused on the service area as a whole, not the specific areas where the EXIF data was pointing.
I can draw one main conclusion from this:
Although it helps the “near me” queries in those targeted areas, it hurts everywhere you don’t add geotagged images.
The solution?
Upload tons of images to every town in the area to combat that. But you’re going to run into two problems if you do this:
Your GBP will be spammed with low-quality images for the sake of adding images. Wouldn’t it be better to just make sure the GBP is using good photos? Adding images for the sake of rank diminishes the user-facing quality.
You’re still losing rank for queries that use the target city in the keyword. It’s a trade-off that only looks at one version of a search term. The other version appears to have negative consequences.
For these reasons, our agency won’t geotag our clients’ GBP images. Instead, we’ll focus on things that have a greater impact on local rank.
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If you try to add a new business to Google Business Profiles today, you may run into difficulties. When you get to the screen where you add your phone number and website address, Google won’t let you proceed to the next step.
It is unclear if there is an issue with phone numbers in general, which may be causing this bug, or not. But there are also businesses reporting their phone numbers are being removed and also rejected from their Google Business Profiles.
More details. As noted, on this screen, the “Next” button, simply won’t take you to the next screen:
Google product expert, Vinay Toshniwal, wrote in the Google Business Profile forums:
I’ve come across several posts about users facing issues when creating a Google Business Profile—specifically where the “Next” button becomes unresponsive after entering the phone number and website details.
Please note that I’ve already escalated this issue to the Google team. I’ll share any updates here as soon as I receive more information.
Vinay Toshniwal also noted that phone numbers are disappearing from some Google Business Profile listings.
Why we care. If you are trying to get a new business added to Google Business Profiles and run into this issue, you should know that this is impacting everyone. There seems to be a bug with Google where you cannot add new businesses right now. I suspect this will be fixed in the coming hours or days.
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AI-powered search is drastically changing the way people find information. For years, ranking well in Google and Microsoft Bing has been the foundation of search visibility.
But as AI-driven search gains traction, is that ranking priority shifting or staying the same?
We’re in an era of uncertainty we haven’t seen since the early days of SEO – when search engines rose and fell in a battle for relevance.
Time will tell which AI answer engine wins the game. SEO is still relevant, but AI is rewriting the rules.
This article will break down:
Six AI search players to watch and how they source content.
Market share and usage trends that show where search behavior is shifting.
How AI answer engines still depend on traditional search engines.
What businesses should do now to optimize for AI-driven search.
Here’s what you need to know.
AI models and real-time search
Before we move forward, a quick note on how these AI platforms generally work. AI models are trained on data available up to specific cutoff dates.
For instance, Google’s Gemini 2.0 Pro had a knowledge cutoff in August 2024, while OpenAI’s GPT-4o extended its training data up to June 2024. Yes, it can change daily.
This means that for recent events or emerging trends, among other things, these models rely on real-time data retrieval rather than their internal knowledge base.
In other words, their ability to provide accurate and up-to-date results is directly tied to their ability to access and process new information from the web. That is key.
Another thing to note is that AI search engines can build their own web indexes.
For instance, Perplexity AI’s PerplexityBot crawls the web directly, creating its own content database rather than relying on Google’s or Bing’s indexes. But even so, AI search engines can and do still rely on search engine results, too.
Website owners who want to control how AI search engines access their content can manage these crawlers in their robots.txt settings.
Now let’s discuss the different ways AI search engines are relevant to SEO today.
Google: AI Overviews
AI Overviews represented a huge shift in Google Search.
Google’s AI-generated responses – powered by Google’s Gemini AI model – are designed to provide quick but comprehensive answers by pulling information from multiple sources.
For SEO professionals, this introduced both opportunities and challenges.
AI Overviews rely on Google’s search index to determine what information to present, but they also change how users interact with search results.
How AI Overviews work
Google’s Gemini 2.0 AI model powers AI Overviews, generating instant summaries for certain queries.
AI-generated responses appear at the top of Google’s search results, often before traditional organic listings.
Anecdotal data from my SEO agency suggests you need to be in the top 20 for a better chance of inclusion in AI Overviews. There are outliers, and some resources cited in AI Overviews will rank outside of what we would traditionally call “being ranked at all.”
Inclusion in AI Overviews can boost clicks to the cited sources and, according to some research, harm performance for those that don’t show up. For instance, for transactional queries, webpages included in AI Overviews had 3.2 times as many clicks as pages that were excluded. For informational queries, webpages with a presence in AI Overviews had 1.5 times as many clicks compared to webpages excluded by AI Overviews.
If your content doesn’t rank well in Google, it’s unlikely to appear in AI Overviews, reinforcing the need for strong SEO. There are many opinions on which tactics you need to succeed. I advocate continuing to stay the course with a strong SEO program with a balanced mix of technical SEO, on-page optimization and excellent content.
Website owners can control whether their content is included in AI-generated answers. Google-Extended is an opt-out setting that allows websites to block Google from using their content for AI models like Gemini, while still allowing Googlebot to crawl their site for search rankings. Blocking Google-Extended won’t affect your rankings in Google Search, but it will stop Gemini from using your content in AI-generated responses.
Take note: Research shows that inclusion in AI Overviews can be more volatile than the organic search results.
Takeaway: AI Overviews aren’t replacing traditional search, but they are changing how search results are consumed. For now, the strategy remains the same: Optimize for Google Search, and AI Overviews will follow.
Google: AI Mode
In March 2025, Google announced AI Mode, an optional feature designed to offer a more AI-driven search experience.
Unlike standard Google Search, where AI Overviews appear alongside organic results, AI Mode allows users to toggle into a search environment where AI-generated answers take center stage.
Image credit: The Keyword blog, Google
How AI Mode works
A separate search option where AI-generated responses are more detailed, conversational, and visually enhanced. Reminiscent of Bing’s Copilot toggle.
AI Mode “brings together advanced model capabilities with Google’s best-in-class information systems, and it’s built right into Search. You can not only access high-quality web content, but also tap into fresh, real-time sources like the Knowledge Graph, info about the real world, and shopping data for billions of products. It uses a ‘query fan-out’ technique, issuing multiple related searches concurrently across subtopics and multiple data sources and then brings those results together to provide an easy-to-understand response,” according to Google (announcement link above).
Google told Search Engine Land that, like AI Overviews, AI Mode surfaces relevant links to help people find webpages and content, and that Google teaches the model to decide when to include hyperlinks in the response. For example, if it’s likely that users want to take action on a website (like booking tickets), then links would be useful. AI mode will also decide when to prioritize visual information, such as images or videos, for queries like how-to searches.
What this means for SEO
Google says that AI Mode “is rooted in our core quality and ranking systems, and we’re also using novel approaches with the model’s reasoning capabilities to improve factuality. We aim to show an AI-powered response as much as possible, but in cases where we don’t have high confidence in helpfulness and quality, the response will be a set of web search results.”
AI Mode is now in testing. Whether it will impact click-through rates in the same way as AI Overviews remains to be seen.
Takeaway: AI Mode signals an ongoing shift towards AI-dominated search results. For now, we can assume that the importance of ranking well in traditional search remains the same.
Gemini is Google’s competitor to ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. Gemini functions as both an independent chatbot and the power behind AI Overviews in Google Search.
Over the coming months, Google plans to upgrade virtually all Assistant-enabled devices – from phones to smart home gadgets – to use Gemini as the default assistant.
This shift shows Google’s long-term commitment to AI as a core part of search and user interactions.
How Gemini works
Gemini pulls from Google search results and third-party content partners (for example, AP) to generate responses, integrating search rankings into its answers.
Gemini can also personalize results based on a user’s Google search history, YouTube activity, and app usage, making responses adaptive rather than purely search-driven.
Market share and adoption
According to Statista, Gemini ranks No. 3 on the most downloaded gen AI apps globally as of January 2025, with approximately 9 million downloads.
Similarweb data shows that the majority of users are aged 25 to 34 (approximately 30%), with the second highest usage among 18- to 24-year-olds at about 21%.
Ranking in Google Search is still crucial, but there’s more. Gemini pulls from Google’s search index, but it also sources data from content partnerships.
Consider content that’s optimized for natural language queries, structured data to help enhance context and education-focused content (where teaching something is front and center).
When Gemini personalizes responses based on user history, visibility in Gemini answers may vary between users. For example, if a user frequently engages with a particular brand’s YouTube channel, Gemini might be more inclined to mention or draw from that brand’s content when that user asks a related question.
Click-through rates from Gemini remain uncertain, as Gemini doesn’t always provide direct links. Gemini comes in third for referral traffic as compared to ChatGPT and Perplexity, according to one study.
Takeaway: Visibility in Gemini means business as usual in terms of having an excellent site that can rank in Google Search, but it also adds complexity with Gemini’s AI-driven personalization and conversational search trends.
Microsoft: Bing Copilot
Bing was the first major search engine to integrate AI directly into its results, launching Bing Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) in February 2023. It’s no surprise Bing beat Google here, as Microsoft has been a big investor in OpenAI since 2019.
How Bing Copilot works
Powered by Microsoft’s Prometheus model, which builds on OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Generates AI summaries based on real-time Bing search results and external data sources.
AI-generated responses appear at the top of search results, sometimes before traditional web listings.
You can also click on “Deep Search” for more in-depth AI-powered answers. These answers are also linked to sources found on the web.
In addition, there’s a Copilot toggle in Bing for a more interactive, fully powered AI search mode.
While small compared to Google, it’s possible that Bing’s market share may grow more in the future due to its early adoption of AI-powered search and the reliance of other AI platforms on Bing results.
What this means for SEO
Unlike Google’s AI Overviews, Bing Copilot is more likely to cite sources outside the top-ranked pages, but ranking higher still increases the likelihood of inclusion.
A study by Rich Sanger found that over 70% of URLs included in Bing Copilot summaries rank in the top 20 Bing search results.
Bing may present a growing opportunity as AI search adoption increases.
Takeaway: Bing may no longer be just an afterthought in many companies’ SEO strategies. You’ll want to continue to have a robust SEO program that takes into account ranking signals for Bing.
OpenAI: ChatGPT Search
ChatGPT search is OpenAI’s initiative to enhance traditional search by integrating AI-powered real-time web search into ChatGPT.
It was initially launched as the SearchGPT prototype in mid-2024 and later integrated into ChatGPT, allowing users to access live search capabilities rather than relying solely on pre-trained knowledge.
By October, OpenAI fully integrated SearchGPT into ChatGPT, enabling it to perform real-time web searches and provide more current, sourced information for user queries.
This positioned ChatGPT search as a direct competitor to traditional search engines, offering users an AI-powered alternative to platforms like Google and Bing.
But here’s the kicker: It still relies on search engine results.
How ChatGPT search works
Powered by a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, post-trained using synthetic data-generation techniques. This includes distilling outputs from OpenAI’s o1-preview model, meaning some responses are AI-synthesized rather than directly retrieved from the web.
SearchGPT pulls data from multiple sources, including third-party search providers like Bing and direct content partnerships that supply proprietary information.
Market share and adoption
ChatGPT is the most widely used text generation AI tool, holding nearly 20% of the global generative AI user share in 2023, according to Statista.
ChatGPT’s weekly active user base doubled in six months, with 400 million weekly active users now relying on its search capabilities, according to TechCrunch.
Image credit: “Leading generative artificial intelligence (AI) text tools market share of users globally in 2023,” Statista.com
What this means for SEO
Since SearchGPT relies on Bing’s indexing system, ensuring your content ranks in Bing is essential. Content not indexed by Bing is unlikely to appear in SearchGPT’s responses.
Chatter in the SEO industry suggests that SearchGPT might favor trusted, high-ranking sources in Bing but that it also relies on sources outside the top rankings in Bing.
The conversational nature of ChatGPT is changing how users search and consume information. Continuing to emphasize helpful content can only make a website more competitive.
In the early days of SEO, search engines were highly susceptible to simple manipulation tactics. Similarly, ChatGPT’s AI-powered search may be vulnerable to manipulation, with tests showing that it could be influenced to return misleading or biased results.
Takeaway: ChatGPT could be the biggest threat to search engine usage. However, SearchGPT’s reliance on Bing means SEO strategies must prioritize Bing to improve the chances of being surfaced in AI-generated results as well.
Perplexity AI
Perplexity AI is an independent, AI-powered search engine that blends large language models with real-time web data to provide concise AI-powered responses with direct citations.
The citations piece is probably one of the more compelling things about Perplexity.
In an interview with Lex Fridman, Perplexity’s founder Aravind Srinivas said:
“When I wrote my first paper, the senior people who were working with me on the paper told me this one profound thing, which is that every sentence you write in a paper should be backed with a citation, with a citation from another peer-reviewed paper, or an experimental result in your own paper. Anything else that you say in the paper is more like an opinion.
“It’s a simple statement, but pretty profound in how much it forces you to say things that are only right.
“We took this principle and asked ourselves, what is the best way to make chatbots accurate, is force it to only say things that it can find on the internet, and find from multiple sources.”
Launched in late 2022, it has positioned itself as an alternative and direct competitor to traditional search engines like Google.
How Perplexity works
Perplexity AI operates as an independent search engine, actively crawling and indexing the web to provide real-time, AI-generated responses to user queries.
Instead of building a massive index like Google’s, Perplexity prioritizes indexing high-quality, frequently searched topics based on user behavior. By focusing on trusted and helpful sources, it optimizes for accuracy and truthfulness while maintaining efficiency.
Each response includes direct source links, differentiating Perplexity from AI chatbots that provide answers without attribution.
Perplexity relies on trusted sources from the web. This means you must have an authoritative presence on the web.
One study showed that 60% of Perplexity citations overlap with the top 10 Google organic results.
Other research indicates that Perplexity has a group of favored, authoritative sources on the web to pull from.
Because Perplexity is an independent search engine, ranking factors will be different from Google or Bing.
Content formatted in a certain way may have a leg up, including clear headings, well-organized sections and succinct answers like FAQs embedded in your content—all of which can be quickly understood and extracted by Perplexity’s model.
Takeaway: Perplexity AI is another contender that could continue to gain traction in AI search and take users away from major search engines. It’s important to remember that it still relies on sources across the web, making an authoritative site with the right content optimized for AI an important step in visibility.
The future of AI search and SEO
While some predict that the rise of AI will reduce search engine volume significantly (Gartner predicts a 25% drop by 2026), the importance of having a reputable website with trustworthy, optimized content remains critical for the foreseeable future.
Time will tell which AI wins the game. With many AI platforms facing legal challenges (like Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity’s lawsuits), legal decisions will also likely shape the winners and how AI search ultimately operates.
So, which AI search engine should you optimize for right now?
I suggest gathering research on the potential for referral traffic and the audience demographics using the AI search engine. Does it align with your industry and business?
For those AI search engines that require “extra SEO effort” on top of what you’re already doing, make sure it’s worth it. Track your referral traffic to see if any patterns emerge.
The situation is not perfect, however. While some websites report clicks are up from things like AI Overviews, others are losing big time.
For example, research shows that for queries where AI Overviews appeared in Google, organic CTR fell sharply from 1.41% to 0.64% year over year.
Image credit: Seer Interactive
On the other hand, a different study looking specifically at AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others found that they send 96% less referral traffic to news sites and blogs than traditional Google Search.
Some data already suggest a basic hierarchy of referral traffic coming from certain AI search engines.
For example, one study found ChatGTP to be a clear winner in referral traffic overall, but things fluctuate based on industry.
Image credit: “SMB websites see rising traffic from ChatGPT and other AI engines,” William Kammer, Search Engine Land
Image credit: “SMB websites see rising traffic from ChatGPT and other AI engines,” William Kammer, Search Engine Land
As we continue to see all this play out, we can relax knowing that the fundamentals of SEO are not going away.
Yes, the approach may change, but the foundation is the same: Put the user first, make a great website that’s optimized for the platforms your target audience uses, and continue to adapt to the different ways you can remain visible in search.
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Google is now rolling out access to AI Mode to its second batch of users. Google first allowed Google One AI Premium subscribers access to AI mode, when it first launched on March 5th. If you opted into AI Mode and are based in the United States, you may now have access.
How to access AI Mode. Once you again access then you should be able to access AI Mode – here is how:
Go to www.google.com, enter a question in the Search bar, and tap the “AI Mode” tab below the Search bar.
Go directly to the AI Mode tab on Google Search at: google.com/aimode.
In the Google app, tap the AI Mode icon below the Search bar on the home screen.
The initial bug. When Google emailed me and hundreds of other searchers with their invites to try AI Mode at around 5:20pm ET today, many were unable to access it. When you clicked the “Try now” button, it told you to opt in and wait to get access.
What is AI Mode. AI Mode is a new tab within Google Search, right now only for those accepted into the Google Search Labs experiment, that brings you into a more AI-like interface. Google said AI Mode “is particularly helpful for queries where further exploration, reasoning, or comparisons are needed.” AI Mode lets you explore a topic and get comprehensive AI-based answers without you needing to do those comparisons and analyses yourself. We saw rumors of this news and it is finally officially here, for some of you.
Why we care. AI Mode may reveal the future of Google Search and search futures that may be incorporated into Google Search in the days ahead.
So see if you have access and play around with it so you can understand how this new Google Search feature works.
Confirmed. Google’s Robby Stein confirmed the expanded rollout of AI Mode:
2/ We’re going to be adding new features and capabilities soon, like more visual responses, richer formatting and new ways to get helpful web content as shown in this example.
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Google Merchant Center click reporting is changing on April 21, 2025, where clicks will be reported in the same manner Google Ads reports clicks. Google said this will align click reporting with Google Ads and thus may impact some current and historical data reported in Merchant Center.
What is changing. Google wrote in this email, “As of April 21, 2025, we’re updating Google Merchant Center to align click reporting with Google Ads.”
The email goes on to say:
“This change reflects new advertising formats that have different types of interactions. While Google Ads reports clicks separately from other interactions, Merchant Center currently reports all interactions as product clicks. With this update, the definition of product clicks will be the same across both platforms. As a result, you’ll notice some changes to your current and historical data reported in Merchant Center. There will be no change to your reporting experience in Google Ads, where you’ll continue to see clicks and interactions for your ad campaigns.”
More details. Arpan Banerjee who notified me of this, said the email has a hyperlink to the Google Ads definition of interactions, which reads:
“The main user action associated with an ad format—clicks and swipes for text and Shopping ads, views for video ads, calls for call assets, and so on.”
Why we care. If you run Google Merchant Center and notice a change in click reporting around April 21st (in about a month), then this is why. This is just a reporting change and the changes you see in the clicks in your reports are not related to any changes in performance of those listings within Google Search.
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People are making more purchases online, whether from home on a laptop or on their mobile phone while on the go. In 2025, retail e-commerce sales are estimated to exceed 4.3 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide, and this number is expected to go up in the following years. Naturally, this rise in online shopping has come with a surge in online stores worldwide. How can you make sure your online store stands out and reaches the right people? Ecommerce SEO can help drive up those sales numbers. In this guide, we’ll explain every aspect and help you get started!
Ecommerce SEO concerns all the tactics you can use to gain more visibility and organic traffic for your online store in search engines, like Google. These tactics focus on the technical and content sides of SEO. By optimizing your store you can get a dependable stream of targeted traffic to your site. This, in turn, should lead to more sales.
Branding is key
You are one of the millions of companies trying to sell something online. Of course, you might think you’re unique, but, in most cases, that’s not true. In most niches, you compete with dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of others. What you need to do is stand out. But how?
First of all, you need to write down your mission. Your mission will clarify what you – and your customers – want your business to be. This will help you identify your USPs (unique selling points) and create a strong brand that resonates with your audience.
Example of strong branding across platforms by Tony Chocolonely.
Building a recognizable brand is not just about visuals like a logo or the colors you use, but also your tone of voice or your handling of customer requests. Being present on the right platforms and showing your audience that you are trustworthy and there to help them. How you present yourself to the outside world makes all the difference. Branding helps you get inside people’s minds and stay there. But stay genuine and fit your branding to your audience.
SEO helps online stores get found by the right customers at the right time. Unlike ads, which stop when you stop paying, strong SEO keeps bringing in shoppers over time. A well-optimized store makes products easier to discover, builds trust, and reduces reliance on paid traffic.
Carolyn Shelby – Principal SEO at Yoast
Technical ecommerce SEO
To get properly started we need to look at the technical aspects first. Here, we’ll go over some important considerations for your online store.
The importance of good hosting
One of the simplest but most impactful things you can do is choose the right hosting for your site and upgrade your hosting plan when needed. Starting out, it might not make sense to drop hundreds of dollars for an extensive hosting plan. But once you reach a certain level, it makes all the sense in the world. Good hosting makes your site faster, pages load properly, and you’ll be able to handle more traffic than ever before. It can also better handle the crawling efforts of Google and other search engines, making it easier for them to index your URLs.
Most hosting providers offer several packages with uptime guarantees, scalability options, dedicated support, et cetera. Find a hosting provider specialized in ecommerce, and don’t try to take the cheap route.
SSL is essential for ecommerce SEO
Long gone are the days when having an SSL certificate for your site was optional. When you are selling something and/or collecting customer data in any way, you need to do so in a secure environment. No one will leave their credit card details on a website that is not adequately secured.
There are other benefits to having a properly secured website. Google, for instance, has said many times that having an SSL connection can give your site a ranking boost. In addition, many of the newer internet technologies like HTTP/2 only work on websites that use HTTPS connections.
Make your site visible through crawling and indexing
You probably want to have all your pages shown in Google, but not being mindful of this can backfire. For example, indexable results from your internal search engine, URLs with parameters from your faceted navigation or product filters, outdated content, temporary pages, and test content can be considered useless URLs. If you have a ton of them, Google will spend a valuable part of your crawl budget indexing those instead of crawling and indexing the pages that you do want to show up in the search results.
Use your robots.txt file to control what search engines can and can’t do on your website and adequately use meta robots tags to block stuff that doesn’t make sense to show in the search results. Also, to get Google to crawl your store correctly, you need optimized XML sitemaps that list your most essential pages.
Improve the URLs of your online store
Getting your URLs right is a crucial aspect of ecommerce SEO. Unreadable URLs make it harder for search engines and site visitors to understand your products. And online stores tend to have a ton of URLs. Usually, every single product has its own URL and every product variation also comes with its own URL. On top of that, things like faceted navigation can generate an endless stream of URL variants. If Google finds the same products on multiple URLs, how will it know which one to show in the search results?
Help search engines by minimizing the number of URLs on your online store to prevent confusion and unnecessary crawling. Check your paginated search results and see if all of these have a unique URL. Give your URLs descriptive names to help search engines identify the contents, so change URLs like /sweaters/323551 to /sweaters/ugly-christmas-sweater. Follow Google’s advice on how to design a URL structure for ecommerce websites.
Be aware of duplicate content
This endless number of URLs showing the same content can cause another SEO issue you want to prevent. If they find duplicate content on multiple pages, search engines won’t know which URL to show which can lead to lower rankings for all pages involved. So make sure to check how your ecommerce CMS handles product variations and faceted navigation. You can use a canonical URL to signal to Google what the original version of a page or product is.
Duplicate content is also a risk when you use product descriptions provided by manufacturers, which are used on other websites. Although you’ll be competing with content on other websites, it will make your product page stand out less. Leading to search engines favoring other websites that do write their own product descriptions.
Add structured data to your products
Structured data lets you describe your products and business information to Google. This makes it easier for the search engine to understand your business and products. In return, you can get rich results like highlighted product information. You can use structured data to provide details like titles and descriptions, stock and shipping details, SKUs, prices, reviews, ratings, and product images for products. Using these details, Google can highlight your products in diverse ways and various locations, like Google Images and Shopping.
With product structured data your products can be highlighted in Google Images (for example).
You can also use structured data to provide business information. Google uses this data to verify whether you say who you say you are. It cross-references the information it finds on your site with what it finds on Google Business Profile. So make sure to keep this information (f.e. location, phone number, opening hours) up to date and consistent. If you want to add structured data to your products (or other pages), the structured data feature in our WordPress plugin and Shopify app might be worth checking out.
Improve your mobile shopping experience
Many people do their online shopping on a mobile phone, and that number is only growing. That’s why your mobile site has to offer a great shopping experience, similar to your website shown on a computer. We call this mobile parity. Your mobile pages should load quickly, work properly, and have no unnecessary distractions. People should not have to wait for your page to load, only to be confronted with things jumping around and buttons that aren’t clickable.
Example of desktop and mobile version of a website: Etsy
Keep the design of your mobile site simple while still offering the branding experience that people are familiar with. Especially on your product pages, you should offer a minimal amount of distraction to get people to convert as quickly as possible. Make sure that your theme is responsive and scales appropriately to all screen sizes without having multiple designs. Give extra attention to the readability of your pages, especially those with more than a bit of text, like product pages or blog posts.
Optimize the page speed of your online store
Site speed is an ongoing challenge for most websites, especially since Google has declared it a ranking factor. For ecommerce sites, that’s even more important because a slow store can cost you customers. It is proven repeatedly that people will more likely buy from an online store with proper page speed. It’s also a vital part of another ranking factor, page experience.
How you improve the loading times of your store depends on the type of store you’re running. Hosted platforms like Shopify and Wix have built-in performance enhancements, like a CDN and image optimization options. For these SaaS platforms, you’re somewhat limited to the choices they make. If you run a WooCommerce store on WordPress, you have more control over your performance. You can choose your hosting plans, your CDN, your cache management, et cetera. Of course, there is no wrong solution. Pick whatever fits your goals and budget.
Improve your code
Many of the performance improvements you can make are found in your code. Make sure that the code of your theme is lean and mean. Fix scripts that block the rendering of your content in the DOM. Minify your code and try to add lazy loading to images where it makes sense. Don’t rely on JavaScript for loading critical functionality and content.
All the evergreen site speed tactics should also be applied to your online store. Think optimizing your images, uninstalling unnecessary apps and plugins, updating your CMS and plugins, optimizing your caching, minimizing the number of HTTP requests, asynchronously loading scripts, et cetera. To get an idea of where you should start, make sure to look at the Core Web Vitals.
User experience improves conversion rates
Related to technical SEO and branding, it’s important to be aware of the overall experience your online store offers its users. You need to help customers feel safe and welcome before they are ready to buy from your store. A well-optimized online store is a joy to use, offers a safe and secure buying experience, and loads in no time — both on mobile and desktop. Photography, typography, and content also contribute to user experience.
User experience is also about taking away frustrations and barriers for users to reach their goals quickly. It’s about optimizing product pages, CTAs, and payment flows to get people moving through the process without issue. Focusing on user experience can help you improve your store’s conversion rates. In addition, it builds a relationship with the customer and helps them come back for more. Build brand loyalty through a pleasant user experience. So add an option for guest checkout, make your site search work, improve the text on your CTAs, and offer proper faceted navigation. To give a few examples.
Don’t underestimate the importance of content
Content is, and will remain, still a very important part of SEO. Ecommerce SEO is no exception to this rule. Having great content on your website, and a proper content SEO strategy can help Google and your customers choose your shop above your competitors.
Keyword research for your online store
An important aspect is figuring out which keywords you can target — and which keywords your potential customers are searching for. It gives you a better sense of the competition and the landscape you are operating in. While doing keyword research for your online store, you’ll also uncover different search intents. Often enough, the customer doesn’t follow a straight line in their buying journey.
However, you can guide potential customers during their buyer journey with helpful content in the right place at the right time. For this, you can use proven marketing strategies like the AIDA model (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) to guide a customer from discovering their need to guiding them to a purchase. At any touchpoint during their journey, you need to be there to stay part of their buyer journey. Keyword research will help you uncover the terms searchers use during the different sections — helping you write content that is valuable and on point.
Improve category pages for ecommerce SEO
Often, category pages can be easier to rank than individual product pages. You can set them up to target a broader set of terms instead of one specific product. Your keyword research can help you use keywords that your audience searches for. Give your category pages a good title and meta description featuring the keywords you want the page to rank for. In addition, pick a proper URL structure for your category pages. Keep them short and focused.
Add a piece of text to the category page to give Google and customers more insight into what this page holds. Don’t overdo it, though; it doesn’t have to be a wall of text. Just ensure that it is written for humans and isn’t stuffed with your keywords.Add great product images to your category pages and link to them from other relevant pages on your website.
Again, consider search intent here; category pages should target and offer solutions for ‘browsing’ behavior. This differs from what you do with individual product pages. For category pages, you want to rank for “Black Dresses” while your product page might want to rank for “Black Dress”.
Add a blog to your online store
One of the most important ways of promoting your online store is via content marketing. Adding a blog to your site gives you a range of options to rank in the search engines and attract a new wave of customers.
While your product descriptions and landing pages allow you to talk about specific products, a blog can be much more flexible. Here, you can dive deeper into your product, your business, and topics related to what you sell. Just make sure it’s relevant to the people you’re trying to target.
Zappos has a great blog with excellent content on various relevant topics.
With high-quality content, you show that you are passionate about your product and that you are an expert on the topic. Trust and expertise are crucial factors for Google and visitors to find the business they want to buy their products from.
Relevant content has a great chance of ranking if you target the right keywords. You can write all-encompassing, authoritative cornerstone content that you can use as a base for your content strategy. Supporting those articles, you can go into more detail about specific aspects. For instance, the guide you are reading now is supported by numerous articles on ecommerce SEO topics which are all interlinked.
Improve your product pages for SEO and conversion
Your product page is where the magic happens. Here, you want your customers to hit that buy button without hesitation. But what are the aspects of an excellent product page? What can you do to improve your product page SEO?
Write great titles and meta descriptions
The words you use to describe your articles are essential. Of course, this also goes for the words you provide for your product to be used in the SERPs — the titles and the meta descriptions. In 2021, Google was actively rewriting more page titles than ever. According to them, too many sites were using non-descript or spammy titles. Therefore, it is even more important to improve your titles and keep an eye on what Google is showing for your products.
Using WordPress/WooCommerce SEO plugins and Shopify SEO apps like Yoast SEO for Shopify, you can set up templates for both titles and meta descriptions, so they follow a similar pattern. This saves you time, and you won’t have to do everything by hand. Of course, you should write everything by hand for your most important articles and pages. Make them stand out!
Write your own product descriptions
We already touched on this topic briefly while discussing the risk of duplicate content. To prevent your product descriptions from being the same as 100+ online stores out there, you need to write them yourself. If you have a ton of products, start with the ones most important or most valuable.
Be sure to write in the language your audience uses to find and describe these products. Don’t use jargon or made-up words that only a few people will understand. Good product descriptions are easy to grasp and easy to read. Also, stay away from walls of text — use a good header hierarchy and break up the text with paragraphs and lists for readability.
Add unique, high-quality product photos
Excellent product images are another great way to set yourself apart from your competitors. Your customer wants to see your products in detail. Even if you have an offline store as well, photos show what your products look like and give you that edge over competitors who just use the images provided by the manufacturer. Try to take authentic photos and do it yourself. Make sure they are high-quality and show your product in use to show what it looks like in real-life situations.
Everlane combines great product photography with animated GIFs to show their backpack in use.
If you’ve shot good photos of your products, optimize them for the right size, compress them and give them a proper SEO-proof name. Use the product name in the image file name and the alt text when you upload it to your store.
Add reviews of your product or service
Reviews are incredibly important for your business. Collect them, display them and add review and ratings structured data. It can nudge customers to buy your product or service. It also helps Google turn those reviews into highlighted listings in the search results — with stars and all.
Fable England shows a reviews tab next to their products that allows you to scroll through reviews.
Most shoppers look up reviews before buying a product or deciding on a service. While the availability of reviews on your product pages helps build trust, they need to be genuine. Don’t publish fake reviews or only publish the ones that paint your product or service in a positive light. Even negative reviews have a place! What’s more, how you respond to negative reviews says a lot about you and your business.
Add related products for cross-selling and internal linking
To increase the conversion rate and the total amount spent per cart, you can use a variety of tactics. One of those tactics is adding related products on your product pages and even on your checkout screen, although you need to test that second option so that it doesn’t harm the checkout process.
The same goes for a list of alternative products for the one a customer is looking for. An ‘Other customers also look at’ feature helps uncover more products for your customers, plus it helps them reach their goal more quickly. In addition, this helps your internal linking as well. By doing this, you make it easier for customers and search engines to reach different parts of your site.
Improve the shopping experience with filters
For online stores, faceted navigation is a must-have on category pages. Faceted navigation — also known as product filters —, lets users filter their search to a more manageable level. We all know filters like size, price, color, brand, et cetera. Offering ample filter options genuinely improves a shopper’s experience on your site. Filters give them the possibility of finding a product with much less friction.
Filtering (subcategories, availability, price, country) on a category page of Ten Thousand Villages.
When set up correctly, they should work without issue. The problems with faceted navigation start whenever this system spits out a massive amount of indexable URLs, thanks to the filtered parameters. This could lead to duplicate content, index bloat, and crawling issues. These URLs mustn’t get indexed by Google.
Handle out-of-stock products
Every online store will eventually reach a point where products run out of stock. How you deal with that is more important. Manage expectations by showing when this product will be back in stock. Or offer ways to keep them in the loop by offering to send an email when it’s available again. There’s more you can do to handle products that are out of stock, but it is important to act upon it to show potential customers and Google that you’re active and trustworthy.
Site structure, navigation, and internal linking
Site structure is essential for every site — and the larger your site is, the more important it gets to keep it under control. Setting everything up transparently helps customers and search engines find their way on your ecommerce site easily. As Google uses the structure to understand your site, you need to think about how you link everything together. With proper internal linking, you can signal to Google which pages are the most important ones. It will prioritize these over other, less-linked pages.
Think about your navigation
The same goes for your navigation. Well-thought-out navigation doesn’t just please Google, but users as well. Search engines like Google use the navigation of your online store to uncover your content. They also use your navigation and your site structure to connect the various parts of your site.
Google, for instance, advises shop owners to add links from menus to category pages, from category pages to sub-category pages, and finally from sub-category pages to all product pages. It’s vital to link to all the products you want to have indexed. Don’t forget to add your most important pages and categories to the footer, as that is important real estate!
Don’t forget about internal linking
Other than having a proper navigation and site structure in place, you also need to link related content to each other. This shows search engines what pages and topics are related to each other and which pages are most important. It also helps site visitors find other related content or pages to the page their currently on, keeping them on your site and helping them find what they are looking for. When you have a blog, internal links also give you a great opportunity to link directly to specific products or categories that are related to that topic. Use internal linking to show the importance of pages and help users navigate through your site.
Link building for online stores
You shouldn’t underestimate the power of link building. These are links from other websites leading to your products and/or content. This is, to this day, an important ranking factor for search engines. Not just having as many links to your website as possible, they need to come from relevant websites and make sense.
You need to publish content that people will link to for this to happen. That doesn’t strictly have to be a blog post, but that could also be a buying guide, an infographic, a tool that helps people make decisions, original research, et cetera. Excellent, unique content has a bigger chance of getting links from relevant sites and people.
Another link building strategy is to reach out to your local community to get them to talk about you. Or you could invest in influencer marketing and digital PR to boost your online store.
Marketing and ecommerce SEO
You can sit and wait for people to show up in your online store, or you can act. While not technically SEO, marketing is still at your disposal — and there’s a lot you can do. We’ve already talked about content marketing, but we’ll also discuss social media, ads, and video marketing.
Social media
Everybody knows social media can do a lot of good when used right. So, use it to your advantage. It won’t help your store rank better, but it can help you get and build an audience. It can function as an extension of ecommerce SEO, and it is a wonderful way of contacting your customers. Social media marketing is essential for your branding — it’s where people can see you and what you do. Make the most of it!
Video marketing
Video is huge, and its growth is nowhere near stopping. Invest in video SEO if you have the budget. Just make sure it looks good and represents your business. With video, it’s important to know what you want to achieve. Do you want to get recognized on YouTube and have your videos rank well there? Then that’s where you should focus your attention as simply adding a few videos to your store won’t help in this situation.
Do you want to produce the best videos on your ecommerce site? Then you need to think about where you want to host these and how to make them click with your audience. Want videos to do well in the organic search results? That’s something else entirely. Figure out if you want to focus on videos for YouTube or your own site.
Running paid ads
Running ads in the search results is another way to stand out from the crowd. It gives you the option to bid for specific keywords and — depending on your niche — can get you a relatively cheap way to the top of the search results.
Fledgling stores often rely on paid ads to get noticed in the search results. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. But, with paid ads, you must keep paying, or else your stream of customers will dry up. It’s not a sensible strategy to just focus on running paid ads. Combine it with SEO, social media, and content marketing.
Google Shopping feed/Merchant Center
While it is good to focus on getting your products found in Google’s organic search results, most online stores also put effort into Google Shopping. Google helps customers find the best products for the best prices in the Shopping section. In 2020, Google made it free for merchants to add their products to the Shopping section. Simply sign up for Google Merchant Center, correctly fill in all the required data about your business and follow the guidelines.
Local SEO for ecommerce
If you combine your online store with a brick-and-mortar one, you must also focus on local SEO. Discover how your online and offline stores can support each other to strengthen each other. Write content optimized for your locale and build good landing pages that help you get noticed for searches in your area. We also offer a local SEO plugin that can help you optimize your website for a local audience. For instance, it adds proper business location schema structured data for your shop and helps you get your details in Google Maps.
Is your online store on Shopify or WordPress?
Shopify is one of the biggest ecommerce platforms out there. And WordPress powers around 43% of all websites worldwide. Both WooCommerce and Shopify are excellent choices for your online store.
For WordPress sites, many of the ecommerce stores are powered by WooCommerce. It’s a solid platform that does a lot out of the box. Put the ecommerce tips from this guide into practice, and you are well on your way to an optimized store.
If your online store is on Shopify, you’ve chosen a platform focused on ecommerce. It comes with pretty much everything you need straight out of the box. If there is something you’re missing, there are tons of apps that can help you out. Although most SEO advice is platform agnostic and this guide will already give you lots of input, we also have a guide on Shopify SEO to help you get your Shopify store ranking high.
WooCommerce SEO plugin by Yoast SEO
To help you quickly set up WooCommerce for optimal SEO, we built the WooCommerce SEO add-on for Yoast SEO. Our WooCommerce SEO plugin adds several extra features while also improving the code WooCommerce puts out to make it more understandable for search engines. It’s an essential tool if you want to get the most out of our WooCommerce store. You can use this add-on with both the free and Premium version of Yoast SEO.
Yoast SEO for Shopify app
One of the most remarkable aspects of Shopify is that you can improve your store by running apps. There are apps for everything, from review management to email marketing and image optimization to cross-selling products. One of the most popular categories is ecommerce SEO, and we’re proud to offer a Yoast SEO for Shopify app as well.
Our app improves the technical SEO of your Shopify store while also offering features that help you produce the best possible product-related content. It comes with SEO and readability analyses, various controls for handling how Google crawls your site, and an impressive Schema structured data implementation that instantly helps search engines understand your products.
The Yoast SEO for Shopify app when you’re working on your product page.
All about ecommerce SEO
That’s it! You’ve just learned a lot. But although this is billed as a thorough guide, a complex topic like ecommerce SEO cannot be contained in one single guide. Where possible, we’ve linked to related articles that go deeper into a specific detail — read these to expand your knowledge!
http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png00http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png2025-03-24 13:00:002025-03-24 13:00:00Ecommerce SEO: how to rank higher & sell more online
To some, SEO is technical; to others, it is creative.
Neither of these is 100% right or wrong.
SEO is all of this and more, depending entirely on the unique situation and goals of the business looking to use SEO.
This loose definition leads to some common and fairly troublesome issues.
One of these issues, which we see repeatedly and completely derails the success of projects – even by experienced agencies – is the misunderstanding between SEO strategy and SEO planning.
This article defines these terms and shows a simple way to ensure both strategy and planning are tackled with the rigor that the modern, hyper-competitive search environment demands.
Even Google is confused
The problem here is that Google does not really understand quality.
It knows what people click on. It understands specific authors, sites, and other traditional SEO metrics to help stack the deck.
However, Google does not enforce the true denotation of words in search results and often leans into common misconceptions.
What I am trying to say here is that Google gives people what they want and, by doing so, often accentuates issues where the meaning of a word has shifted.
SEO strategy is a perfect example.
A search here shows many posts optimized around “SEO strategy,” but none of them actually talk about SEO strategy in any detail (or at all).
What they really talk about is SEO goals and SEO planning.
The fact is that almost the entire first page of results conflates strategy with planning – even the AI Overview gets it wrong.
This leads businesses to focus on tactics without a clear overarching strategic vision.
The result?
Well, bad results for most (other than those hawking to rank for SEO strategy).
Why does this matter?
Am I just some pedant upset that the things returned are not truly relevant?
Well, maybe a little bit.
But, more importantly, I believe there is an opportunity for many hidden in the fog of this issue.
SEO (or any marketing) needs to deliver results.
However, when SEO is approached without clear distinctions between goals, strategy, and planning, efforts become reactive rather than proactive.
Businesses chase keywords and rankings rather than trying to offer something new and unique.
This leads to a hamster wheel of tactical SEO rather than building strategic and sustainable long-term visibility.
A better way forward: Goals, strategy, and planning
A solid SEO approach follows a simple, logical three-step sequence:
Define the goal: Where do we want to go?
Craft the strategy: How will we get there?
Develop the plan: What steps do we need to take?
By structuring SEO efforts this way, you can avoid aimless execution and instead build an intentional, well-structured approach to search visibility.
The rest of this article will show you how to tackle this differently and help steer your efforts toward long-term sustainable growth rather than short-term tactical wins.
First, some important definitions
We started by discussing a common misuse of the word “strategy” and how this leads to the strategy being overlooked.
Before we proceed, I feel it is useful to clarify the terms we use quickly so there are no misunderstandings.
This is denotation vs. connotation – the real meaning of a word vs. the common misunderstanding.
Authority building: Will we focus on link-building, PR, or thought leadership?
For example, if a SaaS company wants to dominate organic search, its SEO strategy might focus on thought leadership and topical authority rather than just ranking for high-volume keywords.
SEO planning: The specifics of the journey
Planning is where the tactical details come into play. It’s the nuts and bolts – everything from optimizing page titles to a full step-by-step breakdown of how to execute the strategy.
An SEO plan may include:
Conducting keyword research
Optimizing existing content
Building a backlink acquisition strategy
Developing a content calendar
Implementing technical SEO fixes
Think of planning as the navigation system that breaks your strategy down into actionable steps.
If there is one thing you take from this article, please let it be this:
Strategy is not planning, and planning is not strategy.
SEO strategy is the big picture that defines why your content should rank and outperform competitors.
While planning involves specific tactics like keyword research or content updates, strategy is about positioning your site as the best answer for user queries for a specific reason (the strategy).
This is not to say that standard SEO planning and tactics are not important.
Not at all.
Rather, by having this all backed up by a strategy, you maximize the chance that you will generate and sustain the results you are looking for.
Ultimately, SEO strategy is about why your site deserves to rank, not just how to optimize it.
The key is to remember that SEO success isn’t just about performing SEO tasks – it’s about approaching them with the clarity and structure provided by strategy.
Goals define the destination.
Strategy determines the best path to the destination.
Planning breaks the journey into actionable steps.
Implementing this structured approach can avoid wasted efforts, allow you to focus on what truly moves the needle, and build long-term organic growth.
This is better than the blind chasing of rankings and random acts of SEO that seem to characterize most campaigns.
Define your goal, craft a winning strategy, and execute a focused plan.
That is the kind of strategic SEO that gets results.
The way people search for information is changing, and Gen Z is leading the shift.
Instead of turning to Google, they’re searching on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and Discord for everything from product recommendations to restaurant reviews and how-to guides.
This isn’t just a trend – it’s a fundamental shift in digital discovery.
Google usage among Gen Z has dropped by 25% compared to Gen X, a 2024 Forbes study shows.
eMarketer reports that 46% of Gen Z and 35% of millennials prefer social media over traditional search engines.
Why?
They crave fast, visual, and community-driven content rather than sifting through traditional search results and ads.
For search marketers, this means SEO is no longer just about Google – it’s about being visible wherever audiences search.
This article breaks down Gen Z’s evolving search habits, why social platforms are winning, and how brands can adapt to stay discoverable in this new search landscape.
The democratization of search
For years, Google dominated search.
For Gen X and early millennials, “googling” was synonymous with searching.
But Gen Z searches differently – they don’t use “google” as a verb in the same way, and it’s reshaping how brands approach discoverability.
Gen Z “googles” 25% less than Gen X, turning instead to social platforms where search is more visual, trend-driven, and real-time.
Even Google has acknowledged this shift – Prabhakar Raghavan noted that “nearly 40% of young people prefer TikTok or Instagram over Google Search or Maps” for local recommendations.
This isn’t just about preference. It’s a shift in search behavior.
Instead of scrolling through links and ads, Gen Z engages with short-form videos, peer recommendations, and user-generated content.
They trust social platforms for their authenticity, immediacy, and personalized experience – something traditional search engines struggle to match.
Opinions on this shift vary. Some claim “Google is doomed,” while others argue it will continue to dominate.
SparkToro reports that Google Search grew by 20% in 2024.
The takeaway is clear: search is no longer just about Google.
If your content isn’t optimized for TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, or YouTube – where Gen Z actively searches – you’re missing a massive audience.
The future of search isn’t tied to one platform; it’s about showing up wherever your audience is looking.
Sometimes, Google will win.
Other times, a TikTok post will.
If you want to succeed, you must create an effective content loop across multiple channels.
A look into social search
Social search has transformed social media from engagement-driven spaces into full-fledged search destinations.
TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit now shape how users find information, products, and experiences.
Up to 41% of users use TikTok for search, while 76% have discovered brands and products through social media.
This shift means users aren’t just consuming content – they’re actively searching for answers, recommendations, and solutions.
A changing search funnel: Social trigger, social discovery, conversion
Social search is compressing and reshaping the traditional search funnel.
Instead of bouncing between multiple touchpoints, users can explore, evaluate, and decide all within a single platform – turning Google’s “messy middle” into a fluid discovery flywheel.
A TikTok review might lead to an Instagram deep dive, followed by a Reddit thread for credibility – all before a Google search even happens (if at all).
Success in search is no longer about a single platform but about understanding user intent across multiple channels.
Winning in this evolving search landscape requires a presence where searches actually happen – by optimizing content for a multichannel, search-everywhere experience.
Why Gen Z prefer social to search
Unlike previous generations who relied on Google to type queries and sift through blue links, Gen Z expects faster, more engaging, and more authentic results.
Social search delivers exactly that.
Here’s how their approach differs – and what brands need to consider.
1. Faster, more visual results
Raised in a digital world of instant gratification, Gen Z doesn’t want to read lengthy blog posts or scroll through endless search results.
They prefer quick, digestible answers in visual formats like short-form videos, carousels, and captions.
TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube are their go-to search tools.
A TikTok search for “best foundation” instantly serves up video tutorials, reviews, and comparisons – far more engaging than a traditional article.
A YouTube Short on “quick meal-prep ideas” delivers step-by-step cooking guidance in seconds, skipping the recipe pages cluttered with ads, bios, and affiliate links.
Instead, they rely on peer recommendations, real experiences, and unfiltered opinions from communities.
Unlike Google, which prioritizes search-optimized content and paid ads, social platforms surface real conversations from actual users.
Instead of reading a blog on the “best budget travel destinations,” Gen Z watches TikTok vlogs of real people documenting their trips.
Rather than trusting company-written product descriptions, they seek out TikTok creator reviews, Instagram UGC testimonials, or Reddit discussions.
This peer-driven content feels more honest, transparent, and credible – making social search more trustworthy than traditional search engines.
3. Algorithm-driven discovery
Unlike traditional search engines, where users actively search for answers, social platforms push relevant content before users even realize they need it – re-engaging them in their search journey.
TikTok’s For You page surfaces content based on past engagement, introducing users to products and trends before they search.
Instagram’s Explore tab curates recommendations based on browsing behavior, making discovery seamless.
Reddit threads and Discord servers expose users to niche discussions, organically driving awareness of brands and products.
This shifts discovery earlier in the customer journey.
Users aren’t just searching when they’re ready to buy.
They’re being passively introduced to brands, leading to high-intent searches later.
This blurs the lines between search and social, inspiration and intent – reshaping the role of search marketing.
The role of community
For Gen Z, an aspect of search is about finding answers from people they trust.
That’s why Reddit, Discord, and private forums are becoming go-to search engines, offering unfiltered insights, recommendations, and real experiences.
Unlike traditional search engines, which prioritize algorithm-ranked web pages, community-driven search thrives on peer-to-peer discussions that feel authentic, specific, and reliable.
These platforms provide what Google and mainstream social media often can’t: deep, real-time conversations shaped by lived experience.
Reddit functions as a crowdsourced knowledge hub, where users explore niche topics, ask for advice, and share product reviews. Many even add “Reddit” to the end of Google searches to bypass promotional content and go straight to authentic discussions.
Discord servers act as private search engines, with dedicated communities – spanning gaming, crypto, fashion, and professional industries – offering real-time advice and recommendations. These closed-loop spaces create powerful, organic brand discovery opportunities that brands have yet to fully tap into.
Community-driven search is shifting the landscape.
Gen Z trusts real people over polished marketing.
Failing to engage with these communities might mean missing out on an audience that prioritizes authenticity over ads.
Why community search matters
Simply put, traditional SEO doesn’t work in these spaces – and you need to accept that.
While TikTok and YouTube offer optimization opportunities, forums and communities operate differently.
You can’t rank No. 1 in a Discord conversation or a Reddit thread.
Instead, you must embed yourself naturally within these communities to stay relevant.
Be present where conversations happen
Actively engage in discussions – whether through creators, users, or employees.
This builds credibility and trust in a way traditional search marketing often struggles to achieve.
Influence through community members
Gen Z doesn’t trust ads – they trust real people.
The most effective way to influence brand perception is through engaged community members, influencers, and subject-matter experts who are already part of the conversation.
Create valuable, non-promotional content
The key to success isn’t pushing products – it’s offering real insight.
Providing helpful answers, sharing expertise, and engaging meaningfully are more likely to be remembered and recommended organically.
Not sure where to start? Try this
A simple first step is to use Google Trends and the Glimpse Chrome extension to uncover where your audience is actually searching:
Install Glimpse for Google Trends to unlock additional insights.
Search for a key term related to your brand.
Check the Channel Breakdown chart to see which social platforms your term is most popular on.
Explore top-ranking content on those platforms using tools like TikTok Creator Search Insights, Reddit Pro Trends, and Pinterest Trends.
Build a content strategy that aligns with the platform’s format, trends, and user intent.
This approach ensures your brand shows up where your audience searches – not just where you assume they are.
The future of search is everywhere
Gen Z is redefining what it means to search.
Social, visual, and community-driven discovery is shifting the landscape, and traditional SEO alone is no longer enough.
Search marketers must move beyond Google rankings and embrace multi-platform search strategies.
If your audience searches on TikTok, YouTube, or Reddit more than on Google, do you really have visibility?
Brands that recognize search as an omnipresent, multi-platform experience will gain a competitive edge.
https://i0.wp.com/dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Social-search-is-Gen-Zs-Google-Are-you-visible-where-it-matters-800x450-TtCzGz.png?fit=800%2C450&ssl=1450800http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png2025-03-24 12:00:002025-03-24 12:00:00Social search is Gen Z’s Google: Are you visible where it matters?
Imagine this: You are a wealthy art lover seated in a room filled with beautiful paintings and surrounded by other art lovers. You have a numbered paddle in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. You are at the center of an auction and about to bid against all the other people in the room for the artwork you want.
Now imagine you are blindfolded! The auctioneer’s rapid-fire speech guides you as prices go higher and higher.
You periodically raise your paddle to make a bid; you assume that those around you are doing the same. But what if they’re not? What if the joke is on you, and you’re feverishly raising your paddle again and again to win the auction while everyone else in the room is motionless, watching you bid against yourself?
Never forget: Google Ads is an auction. Most of the time, you are blind, unaware of competing bids for the keywords your business needs to win.
At BrandPilot, we call the phenomenon of a search ad with no competition the “Uncontested Paid Search Problem.”
The Uncontested Paid Search problem
The BrandPilot definition of the Uncontested Paid Search ad is a Google search where no competitor ad is present across several search terms. Yet, you are still paying for your sponsored ad CPC, even without competition. You are essentially bidding against yourself.
Here’s an example of an Uncontested Paid Search ad. In this case, you can see that the sponsored ad is directly above the organic result, meaning there is no other competition for this search result.
There are two problems with these Uncontested Paid Search ads:
Wasted ad spend on organic traffic: A significant number of people simply click the sponsored ad as it appears at the top of their search, unnecessarily costing you money.
Overpaying for clicks in paid search: You want people to click on your sponsored ad, but you are unnecessarily paying a high CPC in the absence of competition.
The critical takeaway here is that advertisers are paying high CPC for ads with no competition every hour of every day. The whole point of the Google keyword auction is to bid fairly against your competitors on a CPC for a keyword, so why are advertisers paying the same CPC even when competition is not present?
When do ‘uncontested search ads’ happen?
Instances of uncontested search ads are more pervasive than you might think. While results will vary by industry, data from BrandPilot indicates that Google Ads for:
Branded keywords face no competition 20–30% of the time.
Non-branded (general search) keywords experience moments of no competition but at a rate of 5–10%.
This makes sense as there would be less competition for a keyword specifically related to a brand or product name.
How big is this problem?
Uncontested search ads are a silent thief of marketing budgets. While this topic is not widely discussed, it has enormous impacts on the marketing industry.
Here is one way to measure this industry-wide issue:
Google’s annual search revenue in 2024: $264 billion (Statista)
Ad budget breakdown: On average, 18% ($47 billion) is spent on branded keywords, while 82% ($216 billion) goes to non-branded keywords. (Dreamdata)
Estimated wasted ad spend: Advertisers may be wasting approximately $11 billion annually on branded CPC and approximately $16 billion on non-branded CPC.
How much are you spending on search ads? If you could recover approximately 25% of your branded keywords budget and another 7.5% of the non-branded keyword budget, where would you invest those savings?
How to fix the uncontested paid search ad problem
There are really only two options to optimize for searches with no competition:
Suppress your sponsored ad and let your organic search results float to the top of the search results page.
Replace your current sponsored ad with a clone that you gradually bid-walk down to the lowest possible CPC.
Option 1: Let organic win the day
For this option, marketers can simply pause their existing sponsored ad when there is no keyword competition at that moment. If you are conquering organic search for that keyword, this will allow your organic search results to appear at the top of the search results page and drive organic traffic to your website.
Important note: You would need to ensure that you rank No. 1 organically for that keyword search. Be mindful that, as a marketer, your organic search results might not include your current promos, copy, buyers’ journey, etc.
Option 2: Bid-walking down a CPC
In this scenario, a marketer would allow the sponsored ad and the organic link to appear simultaneously on the search results page.
In this case, marketers create a clone of their sponsored ad that is displayed only when there is no competition. Over time, marketers reduce the CPC of this “no-competition clone.” This allows them to retrain the search algorithm and get the CPC for this cloned ad all the way down to $0.01!
Maintaining search traffic
The above processes are designed to eliminate unnecessary Google Ads spending and create more budget for you to drive growth and revenue. Every month, brands who execute strategy for uncontested ads typically reclaim approximately 30% of their branded keyword budget and another 5–10% of non-branded keywords.
The real-world example below shows how a global fashion brand maintained website traffic while dramatically decreasing its Google Ads spend. In this case, the marketing team elected to simply pause their sponsored ads whenever there was no competition for the search term. Maintaining search traffic is more important to any marketer.
Here, you can see their blended CTR:
Reducing Google Ads spend
While maintaining search traffic, the marketing team was able to dramatically reduce its daily Google Ads spend simply by not paying a high CPC when a search result had no keyword competition. They were able to go from an average spend of $500 per day down to less than $100 — all while maintaining search traffic!
Final thoughts
Here’s the no-brainer: a flaw in Google Ads has you bidding to win the auction, even when there is no competition for your selected keywords. A seven-day inspection of your Google Ads data can help determine how the Uncontested Paid Search problems is impacting your search campaign budget.
You can save approximately 30% of your branded keyword budget each month and experience an 11% increase in site performance based on the redistribution of those wasted budgets.
Book some time to discuss your keyword costs and get a free Google Ads campaign audit.
https://i0.wp.com/dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/BrandPilot-2025-03-4FHOsC.jpeg?fit=1920%2C1080&ssl=110801920http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png2025-03-24 11:00:002025-03-24 11:00:00Are you wasting your Google Ads budget bidding against yourself? by BrandPilot.ai
When Google launched the March 2025 core update last week, Google said there will be a series of improvements aimed to help “better surface relevant, satisfying content” from content creators “throughtout this year.”
But you should not expect all sites to fully recover by the end of 2025, that simply won’t happen.
What Google said. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, in a conversation on X with travel blogger, Nate Hake, explained that there is a caveat to the statement about surfacing those sites better in Google Search again. Sullivan wrote:
“With the important caveat that this doesn’t mean all sites will go back up to wherever they were if they are down from a previous peak.”
Some sites don’t deserve to rank. That means that not all sites will rank as well as they did because, as Sullivan wrote, “some sites with great content and hearts in the right place still don’t provide a satisfying page experience.” Sullivan added:
“But our systems themselves need to get better; it’s not all on creators sites that really do have good, solid content.”
Different systems impact different sites. In addition, different core ranking systems may impact one site but not the other, in the same way.
“From the group you were with that came out and generously shared your time, not everyone is impacted by exactly the same ranking systems,” Sullivan said.
That means you need to wait for the Google system (or systems) that impacted your site in earlier updates, will have a positive impact in future updates. And, honestly, that might never happen.
Search evolves. Plus, search evolves. What Google ranked in 2023 is not what Google wants to rank in 2025. Sullivan wrote:
“Our results have continued to change since 2023, including showing more social content, for example. The results are going to continue to evolve.”
Why we care. Google is committed to continue to make improvements to its search algorithms and systems. Google is aware of the issues many of those who went to the web creator summit won’t recover, Google said that already.
But do expect more Google updates to its core ranking systems throughout 2025, as we have seen with previous core updates and we will see in future core updates this year and in 2026 and beyond.
https://i0.wp.com/dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/google-ranking-chart-1920-800x457-MM9vpG.jpeg?fit=800%2C457&ssl=1457800http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png2025-03-21 21:48:042025-03-21 21:48:04Google: Not all sites will fully recover with future core algorithm updates
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