Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7-Figures and Beyond ecommerce marketing podcast, Greg Shuey urges D2C brand owners and marketers to shift their mindset from chasing keyword rankings alone to building multi-platform relevance across Google, social platforms, and AI tools. While Google still dominates search, the rise of zero-click searches, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, and ChatGPT means customer journeys often bypass traditional search entirely.
Greg explains the concepts of semantic relevance, ensuring content matches the meaning and intent behind queries and narrative relevance, maintaining a consistent brand story across all channels. He shares three starter steps: syndicating answers to real customer questions in multiple formats, keeping a consistent point of view across all platforms, and proactively owning brand comparisons and use cases. By allocating even a few hours each week to this strategy and tracking brand mentions across emerging platforms, brands can future-proof their visibility, compound results over time, and position themselves ahead of competitors still relying solely on Google rankings.
Key Takeaways
- Search behavior is shifting: Google remains dominant but faces growing competition from platforms like YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, and AI tools like ChatGPT, which are increasingly where customers start (and finish) their discovery process.
- Zero-click searches are rising: More users find answers directly within Google’s SERP via AI overviews, People Also Ask, and featured snippets, bypassing websites entirely.
- Relevance > Rankings: Semantic relevance ensures your content matches the meaning behind queries, while narrative relevance ensures your brand’s message stays cohesive and consistent across platforms.
- Three starter steps for building relevance: Syndicate answers to real customer questions, maintain a consistent POV everywhere your brand shows up, and create comparison/use-case content to own competitive positioning.
- Compounding benefits over time: A few hours per week spent on multi-platform relevance can yield exponential returns across SEO, AI recommendations, and brand authority.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- If a potential customer searches on Reddit, TikTok, or ChatGPT for products in my category, will my brand appear in the conversation or recommendations?
- Does my current content strategy prioritize matching keyword phrases, or am I addressing the deeper meaning and intent behind customer searches?
- Is my brand’s story consistent across every touchpoint—social media, ads, product pages, third-party platforms, and influencer partnerships?
- Have I created competitive comparison and use-case content that positions my brand alongside (or above) top competitors?
- Am I actively tracking brand mentions and visibility across multiple platforms, not just Google Search Console?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Datos State of Search Q2: https://datos.live/report/state-of-search-q2-2025/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.25)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing podcast. I am your host, Greg Shuey, and I created this podcast to help D2C business owners and marketers just like you who are stuck day in and day out trying to find ways to grow their businesses. Today, we are going to spend some time diving into the idea behind how it’s important and why it’s important.
to not only focus on chasing rankings. I mean, some people might say stop chasing them altogether, but I don’t. So stop focusing only on that and start working on building relevance across the internet. Whether that’s your website, whether that’s third party websites, we’re gonna talk a little bit about that. Why it’s important to make the mindset shift.
and then also why it’s important to start allocating time and resources to making that shift. So let’s dive in. So the big question that I have for our listeners today is, what if I told you your customers aren’t finding you the way that you think they are finding you? So in 2025, and also as we move forward, traditional search, specifically Google,
is still a big driver of how businesses are getting visibility, how they are getting traffic to their websites, how they are getting purchasers on their websites. Still huge. But cracks are starting to show. Desktop searches per user on Google have declined slightly this year. We’ve talked about that in a previous episode.
while engagement with content platforms like YouTube and Reddit, as well as AI tools like ChatGBT are starting to rise. So, Datos and Sparkoro just released their state of search report for Q2 last week. And some of this content that we’re gonna be going through today is going to touch on that. But before we jump into that, let’s just run through a scenario right now.
Greg Shuey (02:15.86)
So in the past, before chat GPT became a thing, before TikTok got huge, someone needed a product and they went to Google. They started doing searches and it led them to a website and it traditionally led them to purchase on the website. But instead of going to Google now, what they’re doing is they’re potentially searching Reddit threads, also known as subreddits for authentic experiences. Oftentimes they’ll even go in and they will
pose a question to the group and work on curating responses. They may watch TikTok videos or they may go over to YouTube and watch YouTube reviews. They may also ask ChatGPT which product to buy. Once they start gathering this information, maybe pulling it into a notebook on their computer or even a written notebook, they may then end up on the brand’s website weeks later without ever clicking on a traditional Google link.
So they’re coming in as a direct visitor to the website. This is incredibly hard to track, but it’s turning into the reality that we’re facing these days as business owners. doesn’t even have to be in e-commerce, right? I’m facing that with my business right now here at Stryde is that, know, organic traffic is flat or maybe it’s up a little bit, not to the rate that it was up, you know, in previous years. And my direct traffic is up. And I know that the way that people are finding me is through chat GPT because they self-specify in my lead forms. They came through chat GPT. So this is a real thing that all of our business owners are grappling with right now.
Greg Shuey (04:25.686)
Okay, so let’s talk about the old way versus today’s reality. So the old path, right? The old path is they opened up a Google search, they typed in a keyword or some kind of a search query. They landed on a category page or a product page. If they were looking specifically for a product like a black pair of dress pants, they are probably landing on a product page. They are reading the content.
They are looking at the reviews and they are adding to cart and they are buying, right? That’s the old path. This worked really well when attention was centralized. So what has really changed? So let’s dig into some of this data from dados and spark Toro again in that state of search report from Q2. Uh, here’s what’s changed. So Google still owns 95 % of desktop share.
That’s still a pretty big amount. But zero-click searches, if you’re unfamiliar with zero-click, it means that they got an answer from AI overviews, or people also ask, or other rich featured snippets. These zero-click searches are climbing, meaning more users are getting their answers directly inside of the search engine results pages without ever visiting the website.
points right here are fascinating to me is that YouTube remains the number one click through destination from Google searches in both the United States and in Europe. So it means that as soon as someone types something into Google, they click through a YouTube result before they click through anything else, which was fascinating. The number two was Reddit. That ranked number two in the US and has also climbed to number two in Europe as well.
This is reflecting its growing role as a trusted crowdsource information hub. It also doesn’t hurt that Google has a partnership with Reddit. And as of, I think about a year, year and a half ago, maybe even longer, I don’t know, time flies. That partnership’s been in place. And since then, you have seen more more Reddit content surfaced into the search engine results pages. So, know, Reddit, people are trusting that more.
Greg Shuey (06:50.054)
And it is also allowing people, like I mentioned, to have those conversations in platform to be able to, you know, crowdsource information around their purchases. TikTok and Instagram, they have climbed into the top 15 search destinations list, indicating more users are leaving Google to continue discovery on social platforms. And then the big one is that ChatGPT is now in the top 10 destinations from Google searches.
And so this means that AI tools are directly competing for attention and that people are using them. So what does this mean for you as a brand owner or a brand marketer? My big takeaway is that your customer’s journey may start in Google. It may end somewhere else, not in Google and not on your website, but it may just as easily start in TikTok or Reddit.
or YouTube or chat GPT to where it skips Google entirely. I get very well may get to that point. And I think it is for a lot of brands. it’s interesting kind of seeing this shift across a lot of clients, you know, that’s one blessing of being able to work in an agency setting is that we see a lot of clients across a lot of different industries inside of e-commerce. And it’s fascinating to see the ones that are still driving growth through Google and the ones that are cooling off.
it is kind of difficult to predict, honestly, which ones are going to do well in Google, which ones are going to do well, you know, through other platforms, but, you know, it’s definitely, definitely fascinating. So, I touched on relevance at the beginning of this episode. So let’s take some time to define relevance because that is, it’s a big word and it has, I guess, a few different meanings from a marketing perspective.
So relevance today means two things. So it means semantic relevance and it means narrative relevance. So I am going to explain these two by reading very carefully what the difference is with some examples. So if it sounds like I’m reading word for word, I very much am. Semantic relevance refers to how closely a piece of content matches the meaning intent.
Greg Shuey (09:14.474)
and context of a user’s query or topic, rather than just matching it to exact keywords. So if we break that down into practical terms, keyword relevance is, quote, does this page contain the same word the user typed? Semantic relevance is, quote, does this page answer the same idea that the user meant?
even if it uses different words. So do you get the difference between the two of those? It’s pretty crystal clear. So breaking this down. So with semantic relevance, what we’re doing is we are looking for meaning over exact match. It focuses on understanding what the searcher is trying to find, even if their words differ from the context. So an example, a search for cheap running shoes.
could still surface a page titled affordable sneakers for runners because they mean the same thing, but they are very different keywords. All right, let’s talk about context awareness. So it looks at the broader topic and related concepts. For example, for how to fix a leaky faucet, relevant content might include pages around common faucet problems, plumbing repair, or replace a worn washer.
Right? Three very different things, but that all dovetails back into how to fix a leaky faucet. Okay. Entity and relationship recognition. So semantic relevance uses relationships between topics, entities, and attributes. A query for Eiffel tower tickets may surface information about Paris attractions or visiting the Eiffel tower because the system understands their connection between pieces of content.
That’s one of the reasons we lean heavily into content these days, even more so than we did 12 months ago, is because we need to be able to address all of these different topics and then create connections to them so that the LLMs can surface that information and so that Google can surface that information. And then the last thing is user intent alignment. The most semantically relevant results fulfill the searcher’s goal, whether that is to buy
Greg Shuey (11:35.983)
to learn or to compare rather than simply to match the results to their text or the keywords that they are entering in. Okay. That was a lot. So let’s jump into narrative relevance now. Narrative relevance is about how well a piece of content or message fits into and moves forward the overall story or conversation you’re telling to your audience, regardless of platform.
That could be Google, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, ChatGPT, Medium, LinkedIn, it doesn’t matter. That is how the overall story or conversation you’re telling to your audience, regardless of platform, fits into that narrative. So if semantic relevance is about matching meaning, narrative relevance is about maintaining storyline. So let’s break this down as well.
And again, I’m still reading this because these are crystal clear and I don’t want to fudge this. So context continuity, narrative relevance ensures each touch point, blog post, ad, email, social media post, makes sense within the broader brand or campaign narrative. So for example, if your campaign is telling the story of how your product empowers small business owners, meaning a post about
10 tax tips that might be semantically relevant to small businesses, but narratively irrelevant if it doesn’t connect back to empowerment or your product specific role. So does that make sense? Message cohesion. It keeps your audience from feeling like each interaction they have with your business or your brand is random or disconnected. The brand’s plot stays intact across the entire customer journey.
For example, a DTC skincare brand might weave narrative around self-care as self-confidence. Every piece, the product page copy, the TikTok videos, the influencer partnerships, they all need to feed into that storyline, self-care as self-confidence. Next, emotional thought line. Narrative relevance ties into your brand’s emotion arc, ensuring the tone.
Greg Shuey (13:58.477)
values and personality are consistent. So for example, if your narrative is inspirational and uplifting, dropping in a snarky meme into your social media might hurt the overall narrative, even if it’s popular in your niche. Okay, so we want to make sure that that is dialed in and that you don’t deviate from that. And then lastly, strategic progression. It’s not just staying consistent, it’s building toward a resolution
a transformation or a next step that you want the audience to take. So for example, in a product launch sequence, every email moves from curiosity to interest, desire to action, keeping relevance to launch the story. So I hope, and that was a lot, right? I hope that that is crystal clear to everyone. So now that you understand the difference between the two,
Let’s talk about a couple of questions that I think personally that you should be asking yourself as you try to optimize for relevance. And these, these don’t have to be the only questions that you ask yourself. If you come up with some others, great.
If someone asked chat GPT for the best iPhone 16 pro case, does your business appear when subreddits debate the best options for headlights for your Honda CRV is your name there. If YouTube videos compare the top products in the men’s shorts space, have you partnered with the right creators?
put your content and your brand there. Those are a good primer, right? To take your marketer hat off and put your consumer hat on and really think through. I know I’ve talked about that quite a bit over the last few episodes is to really think through like if I’m a consumer, how do I use these tools? What am I asking? And then as a marketer, am I showing up there? And that should help start to guide the way that you start to build your strategy and execute that.
Greg Shuey (16:23.342)
So let’s talk about what it looks like to build relevance, not just rankings. The cool thing is, is that as you start to build relevance for your business, your SEO is going to improve. As you go out and have conversations on third party platforms, your SEO is going to improve. Your rankings are going to improve. So let’s jump in to the three steps to start building relevance. These aren’t all of them at all. These are the three, I would say, baby steps.
to start making and to start investing time in. So step one is to syndicate answers to real questions. So again, I’ve talked about this a lot over the past few episodes, spend time going through people also asked, going through Reddit, going through Quora, going through TikTok comments, going through all of your customer service ticket database and mining all of the questions that your real life customers
Okay, the next step to that is then to create content in multiple formats to answer those questions. So whether that’s a blog post, whether that is a block of frequently asked questions on your category and product pages, whether that’s building short videos that you can then push out to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whether that’s building LinkedIn posts, if your audience is B2B.
whether that’s building email sequences, that way that you have all of this content and it is public wherever the question is being asked because it may not always be asked on your website. Step two is making sure that your POV is echoed across all platforms. POV means point of view. Hopefully all marketers know that, that it is echoed across all platforms.
So if you have a stance on quality, if you have an explanation on why you price the way that you do, if you are a sustainable or a green or an eco-friendly business, all of this content that you produce should be consistent when you push out those messages on your Instagram, your Reddit AMAs, your YouTube video partnerships, responses on review sites.
Greg Shuey (18:46.06)
I think you kind of get the idea there, right? Whatever your message is that you are trying to get out to your customers, it has to be consistent. All right. And then the last step is to own brand comparisons and use cases. This is absolutely critical because when you go and you look at the LLMs, when you type in things into chat, GPT or Google AI mode, or wherever you use the surface information, oftentimes it is bringing back about three to five
recommendations and those recommendations are usually going to be your competitors. You might be in there as well. but as you’re able to go out and build brand comparisons, whether that’s on your website, whether that’s on third party website, you start to create relevance and very tight brand associations with those competitors. So for example, if you sell sheds, you know, backyard sheds, garden sheds, whatever,
and you have content like Suncast versus Ketter Sheds, two brands that sell plastic sheds or resin sheds.
you know, Suncast versus Ketter sheds, which is better, that type of content when the LLMs go and they crawl through that, they read that, they then are able to serve up that content when someone asks, you know, who sells the best plastic shed? Who sells the best? And they’ll be able to pull in Suncast and Ketter because you have this post on your website, this comparison post. You may also write something like,
best sheds for storing lawnmowers or best sheds for storing motorcycles or mountain bikes or whatever. Getting that written and getting that published on your website before your competitors do is going to be a huge advantage and a huge differentiation. Now it’s a matter of time before they level the playing field by creating similar content, but if you’re first to market, that’s gonna be huge for you. It’s not hard to build this content.
Greg Shuey (20:51.468)
You just have to put in the time and make sure that it is impactful and make sure that it is helpful. We’ve heard a lot about helpful content. Make sure that when you press publish, that you truly believe deep down in your soul that this piece of content will help another human being. And if you believe that and it is true, you have a very high likelihood of being able to prime the LLMs and Google to be able to serve up that content.
where it needs to be found. And please, please, please, please do not bash your competitors ever. It’s terrible. It makes you look bad. If you’re doing a compare and contrast piece, it needs to be tactful. Praise them for the things they do good. Praise them for the things they do differently than you do. But you can also position yourself to be stronger in certain areas and the clear choice to be smart about how you do it. All right, let’s talk about tools and tactics really quick before we start to wrap up here.
So to monitor and to build platform or multi-platform relevance, there are a couple of tools and things that you can start doing. First, Google Search Console, obviously that’s the big one, especially if you’re getting a lot of traffic from Google or you’re showing up in a lot of AI overviews and people also ask in Google. That’s going to give you a very good snapshot of what your impression data looks like, as well as what your click data looks like.
I think along with a lot of marketers are not happy that Google has not split out impression data yet based on different SERP features, right? It’s kind of lame that they put it all into one lump sum, but you know, if you know that you’re growing in SERP features at a more rapid pace than you’re growing in, you know, traditional keyword rankings, then you have a pretty good idea that that is driving your impressions up. Okay. That will also give you a really good list of queries.
where you’re already showing up, where you’re ranking, and it will allow you to go do some specific searches inside of Google to see, you showing up for AI overviews? If not, why not? Like, let’s reverse engineer that. Let’s go out, let’s rebuild a piece of content. Let’s add to it, and let’s get showing up in those AI overviews, all right? Reddit search. So, find conversations about your category, and then take time to engage authentically. Don’t spam.
Greg Shuey (23:12.118)
It won’t work, I promise. Don’t, don’t, don’t do it. Fastest way to get banned, fastest way to get kicked off the platform, fastest way to get your IP address from being able to register for another account, and people don’t like it. Those people on Reddit are crazy. I almost liken them to a cult. Like they can sniff out someone who’s just in there for self-promotion versus someone who’s actually being helpful. So get out there, be helpful, engage authentically, don’t push the brand.
Don’t drop links to the URL. You can talk about the brand name. I would not push links very hard, if at all, until you’ve started to build up some clout in the platform so that people can see that you’re helping, not promoting. Brand mention tracking in the LLMs. I know I’ve talked about this before. We use peak, P-E-E-C, dot AI to monitor this. And this helps us to understand if ChatGPT or other AI tools are mentioning your brand.
the cool thing is, is that a lot of other SEO tools are starting to pull this data into their platforms. So SEMrush, Ahrefs, they each start to pull this in. Crappy thing is, is that it requires an account upgrade and it gets expensive really fast. think peak costs us about $300 a month. The SEMrush add-ons an extra a hundred dollars a month per domain.
So you can imagine how expensive that gets when you’re running an agency and then Ahrefs is I think about a hundred dollars per AI platform. So if I want to see chat GPT, a hundred bucks. If I want to see Google Gemini, a hundred bucks. It gets expensive. But I think it’s probably mandatory now to be able to have this for your brand. And it would be in your best interest if your agency isn’t doing this or if you’re not doing it to get those accounts and to be able to have access to that data.
Each tool has their own nuances. I mean, each one’s a little bit different. So I like to have a few of these kind of to pull my data from. So I get a better picture of what’s happening, a more holistic view versus something that’s super siloed into one tool. So be thinking about that. And then the last thing is jumping into YouTube search or jumping into TikTok and doing searches. Identify rising creators.
Greg Shuey (25:33.687)
and keywords in your niche and start figuring out how do you work with these people? How do you engage with them? How do you seed products to these people to be able to do reviews and so forth? you know, even though Google is super massive and traffic from it is still massive, I think it’s been kind of crystal clear what we’ve gone through today is that the data shows more users are clicking through to YouTube, Reddit, TikTok and ChatGPT and that’s growing every single month.
So it means that ranking in the SERP or search engine results page is just one checkpoint, right? It’s one piece of the overall customer journey, not the finish line. It’s interesting. I still use Google a lot. My wife mentioned to me last night as we were looking at new dogs and how to train a new dog, because we just lost ours. She mentioned that she hasn’t been to Google in over a week.
All she’s using is chat GPT. I’m not that far down that road, but it’s, it’s crazy to me. And she’s, she’s younger than me. She’s in her late thirties. And, you know, I think more and more people are slowly kind of moving platforms, which, know, if, if, if you’re on top of this, doing the things that we talked about today, you’re going to be positioned really nicely. it’s, it’s, it’s interesting. You just have to be everywhere at the end of the day. So as we start to wrap up.
I think there’s probably three main key takeaways that I want to stress. So rankings still matter. Traditional keyword rankings still matter, but multi-platform relevance is going to be your big multiplier, right? That’s what you’re looking for as a business owner, as a marketer is like, what’s the multiplier going to be? How can I optimize once and get two, three, four X multiplier on those efforts?
That’s where the real growth and the real scale starts to happen is with multipliers. I think the second one is that Google’s dominance is stable, but it’s not absolute. Like I mentioned, platforms like Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, ChatGPT are quietly carving out bigger chunks of discovery. They are. And it’ll be interesting when we get Q3’s report, Q4’s report to see how that’s growing.
Greg Shuey (27:53.834)
Is it going to grow more aggressively? Who knows? Is it going to plateau? Maybe. Who knows? I’m not sure. And then the last thing is audit where you appear across the full discovery ecosystem and then commit to adding at least two new non-Google touch points this month. I think as I thought through this and kind of as we wrap up this episode, like if you can carve out two, three, four hours a week to work on this, which isn’t a lot.
Right? It’s five to 10 % of your time if you’re working 40 hours a week, which we know most of us aren’t. It’s not a lot. If you can carve out that amount of time each week, you’re going to be much further ahead of your competitors who are either sticking their head in the sand or they’re just dabbling in it for an hour or two each month because they’re still not sure. They’re still not sure if it’s going to work, if chat GPT is going to be a thing, even though the data shows us that it’s starting to become a thing.
Um, I mean, so my, my recommendation is there, get out there, get it done and see what happens to your business. I promise as you do this, you’ll, you’ll see compounding results from these efforts. may not look like a month, a lot in month one or month two, three, four, five, six, you’re going to see more. then six to 12, you’re going to see like significant compounding results from these efforts across traditional search and across chat GPT and these other platforms.
So I hope that this episode was helpful. hope it was insightful and that you were able to find two to three golden nuggets that you can take and start implementing today. Thank you so much for sharing a few minutes of your day with me and I hope that you tune in again next time. Take care everyone.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
