Why growth-minded businesses need to rethink search
If your business still treats search as a channel instead of a behaviour, you may already be falling behind.
For years, we optimised for algorithms. We got good at it. Built links. Sharpened page speed. Laced headlines with keywords. But search isn’t just changing, it’s completely redefined. And that redefinition has major implications for anyone relying on organic traffic to drive growth.
At Open Velocity, we work with scaling businesses that often find themselves stuck between growing complexity and flattening results. In this shifting landscape, it’s not just how you show up in search that matters, but when and why you’re remembered in the first place.
Here are two strategic shifts that smart businesses are starting to make.
1. Familiarity wins before the query
Most journeys don’t start with a search box. They start with a feeling. A memory. A trigger.
That’s not just poetic, it’s data-backed. Even before zero-click search became widespread, 82% of people clicked on a brand they were already familiar with when faced with a search results page. And 60% of customers say they prefer to buy from a brand they already know when trying something new.
In other words, if you’re not already on the radar, you’re invisible at the moment of need.
So the real questions become:
- Do people even know you exist?
- Do they trust you?
- Do you stand out?
This is where most SEO conversations fall short. Too often, teams focus on the query and forget the conditions that shape it. Brand salience (being remembered) and brand preference (being chosen) are not the same thing. You can have one without the other. And if you’re only investing in being found, not remembered, you’ll lose to the familiar name, even if their product is worse.
What to do instead:
- Start earlier – Build familiarity before your audience starts searching. Optimise for unbranded curiosity, the questions, moments, and emotions that happen upstream of conversion.
- Earn attention creatively – In crowded markets, true differentiation is rare. You might not be able to offer something no one else does, but you can be recognisably you. Distinctiveness – visual, tonal, narrative -helps you get remembered. When people are spoiled for choice, familiarity and recall often win.
- Amplify your distinctiveness across all your marketing – Standout is cumulative. The more consistently you show up distinctively, the more likely you are to become the default choice in the minds of your audience.
- Embed SEO in brand strategy: Your search team shouldn’t just focus on what you offer, but why you’re different. Distinctiveness should be baked into every asset, not bolted on post hoc.
Search visibility is still vital. But it’s not enough. Salience and credibility determine who gets shortlisted long before the SERP is even loaded.
2. Search is everywhere
Still think of SEO as what happens on search engines? It’s time to broaden your lens.
Today’s search behaviour is fragmented. People seek information on TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, Discord, WhatsApp groups. Their journeys are emotional, iterative, often non-linear. And what earns trust varies wildly across audiences.
Take Barbour jackets. For one buyer, the brand signals heritage and upper-middle-class countryside style. Their journey might involve a Telegraph article or John Lewis product page. For another, Barbour is a TikTok fashion trend. Their search begins with creators, aesthetics, and social proof, not product specs.
Same product. Same ultimate goal. Wildly different search behaviours.
This is the strategic unlock: if you treat search as a behaviour rather than a channel, you start asking better questions:
- Where does my audience go when they’re curious, not just when they’re ready to buy?
- Who influences them before they start searching?
- What does trust look like to them and where is it earned?
What to do instead:
- Invest in qualitative insight: Keyword data is useful, but incomplete. You need to understand the why behind the search, not just the what. What emotional need is being met? What stories are shaping their expectations?
- Map trust markers: For each audience segment, build a picture of who they trust, what content they consume and how they evaluate choices.
- Build your journey from the insight up: Start with how real people behave, not with a funnel model. The channels you need to show up on will follow.
You don’t need to be everywhere. But you do need to be somewhere meaningful, long before your customer hits Google.
This isn’t about not investing in SEO
With search volumes shifting, AI reshaping the landscape, and Google no longer the default starting point for many journeys, it’s fair to ask: Is SEO still worth it?
The answer is yes, but only if you stop thinking of SEO as a standalone channel, and start treating it as part of a broader strategy to earn attention, trust and preference.
SEO still plays a vital role in being found. But whether you get clicked and whether that click turns into a customer is shaped long before someone types a query. It’s shaped by how familiar you are, how credible you seem, and how well your story sticks across all the places your audience spends time.
This means:
- Investing in SEO makes sense, but only when it’s connected to your wider marketing strategy
- Search teams need to feed into strategy, not just execute against it. Their insights into real user behaviour, emerging questions and performance gaps are too valuable to silo.
- Your success in search increasingly depends on what happens outside search engines and the memory, meaning and context people bring to that moment.
