Integrating SEO into omnichannel marketing for seamless engagement

With customers now discovering content across traditional search engines, LLMs, social media, and beyond, the need for an integrated, omnichannel strategy is more important than ever.

Relying on isolated channel strategies no longer works. 

Customers engage with brands across multiple touchpoints before making decisions, and they expect seamless, personalized experiences. 

An effective omnichannel approach aligns all marketing efforts – ensuring consistency, maximizing visibility, and driving meaningful interactions.

As omnichannel marketing continues to evolve, integrating SEO across all channels is essential for sustained growth.

This article explores why a unified strategy is critical and how SEO can work across channels to enhance the customer journey and drive results.

Why an omnichannel approach to SEO is critical in 2025

Here are seven trends that make an omnichannel approach vital to business success and growth.

1. The shift away from third-party cookies

The decline of third-party cookies has made it harder for brands to track users across the buyer journey. 

An omnichannel approach to data collection and centralization helps mitigate these challenges and lays the foundation for an effective strategy.

2. Growth of LLMs and AI-powered search

The growth of alternate avenues for audiences to find information adds to the complexity of the buyer’s journey. 

This presents additional attribution challenges. 

3. Zero-click searches and decreasing top-funnel traffic

Due to the rise in zero-click searches, traffic to websites from top-of-the-funnel information-seeking terms is declining. 

4. Importance of SEO

Despite the growth in zero-click searches, SEO remains the primary source of traffic for most businesses and the channel with the highest long-term ROI. 

AI Overviews and AI-generated results mainly pull information from the top organic results.  

5. Search is multi-modal

This means written content is not the only content you need to optimize. 

To effectively saturate SERPs, you must optimize all your digital assets, including images, videos, and PDFs. 

6. Personalized experiences

Personalization is key to customer engagement. Up to 71% of consumers expect it, while 76% find generic content frustrating, per a McKinsey study. 

Businesses that prioritize personalized marketing can see up to a 40% increase in revenue. 

An omnichannel approach ensures marketers focus on customer intent rather than marketing channels.  

7. Unified customer experience with agent economy

The growth of artificial intelligence has resulted in the emergence of an agent economy, where AI agents are beginning to revolutionize marketing and digital experiences. 

They can easily connect dots across multiple channels to deliver a unified customer experience.

Tackling the visibility dilemma in customer journeys

With all the changes in the industry, consumer behavior, and technological advancements, we need to answer important questions that marketers are confused about. 

• How can you learn about audience intent even when they do not visit the site after a search?
• How do you gather data on your audience’s behavior after they leave your site if they do not convert during their first visit?
• How can you develop effective SEO, paid, zero-click, and content strategies with limited visibility into the customer journey and insights into customer intent and personas?
• How can you provide personalized experiences without third-party data, limited traffic, and visibility into your customers’ journeys?

This is where an omnichannel approach can help businesses enhance visibility, drive meaningful interactions, and create a seamless path to conversion.

Building blocks of an omnichannel strategy

A true omnichannel strategy is no longer limited to traditional marketing channels like SEO, paid, email, social media, etc. 

Today, it is about delivering a unified experience at every stage in the customer journey at every touchpoint. 

It includes effectively using channel-agnostic strategies and tactics, such as personalization, AI agents, conversion optimization, A-B testing, and co-optimization. 

Here are five building blocks for creating an omnichannel strategy that truly engages your audiences consistently across touchpoints in an AI-powered world.

Reliable data

Ensure you have the necessary infrastructure to gather and segment customer data accurately. 

AI can then be layered to:

• Build audience cohorts.
• Predict user journeys.
• Deliver real-time personalized experiences. 

Dig deeper: How to boost your marketing revenue with personalization, connectivity and data

Artificial intelligence

Having an organizational AI strategy is key to ensuring the effective use of AI, not just for content generation but also for improving:

• Efficiency.
• Process automation.
• Customer data segmentation.
• Forecasting.
• Real-time personalization at scale.
• And more.

Dig deeper: 4 pillars of an effective enterprise AI strategy

Digital assets

Having a digital asset manager that lets you centralize, optimize, and distribute all your digital assets across marketing channels is key to ensuring consistency and reducing duplication. 

Dig deeper: Visual optimization must-haves for AI-powered search

Infrastructure

Search-friendly infrastructure and content management system are crucial for effectively crawling and indexing your content, and delivering an engaging, personalized experience to your visitors. 

Dig deeper: How to select a CMS that powers SEO, personalization and growth

Structured data and entity optimization

All search engines, including LLMs, detect entities within your content to understand what your content is all about.

Structured data – or schema markup – helps search engines detect entities and all your digital assets. 

This helps maximize your content visibility and SERP saturation. 

Dig deeper: Future-proof your SERP presence: 6 areas to focus on

9 steps to integrating SEO into an omnichannel customer journey

You can start developing your omnichannel strategy while closing any gaps you have identified in the building blocks.

Step 1: Audience and intent mapping

Start with your audience and intent. Identifying target audience personas and their intent is the first step in audience mapping. It is important to review:

• Content performance: Evaluate performance of page types or templates to understand gaps in content strategy (e.g., category pages vs. product details pages vs. location pages vs. blog content).
• Search engagement insights: Search console data can help identify high-intent terms with low click-through rates. This information can inform zero-click and CTR optimization strategies. 
• Channel overlaps: Identifying how visitors overlap across channels is key to crafting an integrated and unified experience. For example, paid and organic channels must work together to saturate the full funnel and maximize ROI from both channels.  
• Conversion optimization: Content with high engagement can provide insights into visitor intent. This can help define A-B tests, UI/UX enhancements, and personalization strategies.

Step 2: Define clear strategic goals

The next step is to have clear and smart goals that you want your omnichannel strategy to achieve:

• Set specific, measurable business objectives (revenue growth, customer retention, growing market share, etc.)
• Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for channel-specific and overall performance. For example, if the goal is to improve visibility, the primary KPIs should be around impressions, clicks and rich results visibility. Traffic or conversions can be secondary KPIs but should not be the primary success criteria.
• Create baseline metrics to measure improvement against current performance.
• Develop a measurement framework that accounts for cross-channel attribution challenges.

Step 3: Map the customer journey across all touchpoints

Traditional funnel is changing rapidly. 

Brands should be ready to respond to customers across all touchpoints fast and with quality.  

Develop a comprehensive understanding of how customers interact with your brand:

• Create detailed personas representing your target audience segments.
• Identify patterns in cross-channel journeys using path analysis in analytics and create common use cases.  
• Aggregate and centralize data across customer touchpoints (website analytics, CRM, sales data, app usage, etc.)
• Segment customers based on behavioral patterns rather than just demographics.
• Quantify the value/attribution as a combination of different journey paths and touchpoints.
• Measure channel preference and effectiveness across different customer segments.

Step 4: Omnichannel audit

Based on your goals and journey maps, evaluate your current channel gaps and capabilities:

• SEO audit: Analyze search visibility metrics, technical health scores, and overall SEO performance.  
• Content audit: Measure content performance data, topical and entity coverage, competitive gaps, engagement rates, conversion impact, and cross-channel content effectiveness.
• Local presence assessment: Evaluate local search visibility metrics and location-specific engagement.
• Experience audit: Analyze drop-off points and measure cross-channel friction.
• Data and technology assessment: Evaluate data collection and measurement framework to optimize your data infrastructure.
• Full-funnel audit: Learn from your visitors. Past visitor data can provide meaningful insights into audience segments, what visitors engage with, and where they drop off in the conversion funnel. This can help identify opportunities for co-optimization, A-B tests and delivering personalized experiences across channels.

Step 5: Develop your integrated channel strategy

Here, focus on aligning your channels to ensure they work together seamlessly and support your overall business goals.

• Prioritize channels according to attribution data and customer value metrics.
• Leverage machine learning and predictive analytics to forecast the impact of each channel.
• Use predictive analytics to determine the optimal channel mix.
• Set channel-specific targets that ladder up to overall business objectives.
• Create frameworks for continuously testing and validating channel effectiveness.
• Define how channels will complement and support each other across the customer journey. 

Step 6: Content orchestration strategy

While a content strategy focuses on what content is needed, a content orchestration strategy also encompasses distribution frameworks that enhance audience interaction with your content.

Friction analysis

Analyze how your audience engages with your content to identify friction points. This process helps you identify, rectify, and optimize:

• Inconsistencies.
• Intent misalignments.
• Delivery mechanisms (text, images, video, etc.).

Content intelligence

Assess the performance of your existing content across various channels and identify competitive gaps and opportunities based on audience personas and business goals. 

Here are a few steps to evaluate content gaps and refine your strategy:

• Identify underperforming content for optimization.
• Spot gaps in content that need to be addressed across channels and stages of the customer journey.
• Recognize cross-linking opportunities to create content hubs.
• Prioritize new content to close competitive gaps and achieve business goals.

Cross-channel content strategy

After identifying friction points and content gaps, develop a tailored content strategy for each channel, prioritizing based on business goals:

• Broader informational content to enhance awareness during the discovery stage of the customer journey (e.g., social media, blog content).
• Comparison content for the consideration stage (e.g., product pages).
• Landing pages focused on specific buying-intent terms during the conversion stage.

Content optimization

Optimizing content extends beyond targeting the right keywords. Your content optimization strategy should include:

• Closing topical gaps in content that create friction.
• Developing an entity optimization strategy to maximize content discoverability.
• Implementing a click-through rate (CTR) strategy to enhance traffic from discovered content.
• Optimizing visual content.
• Establishing an engagement and conversion optimization strategy that includes personalization, calls to action optimization, A/B testing, messaging strategies, UI/UX optimization, and conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Dig deeper: The complete guide to optimizing content for SEO (with checklist)

Step 7: Infrastructure and technical SEO

To give your content the best chance of being crawled, indexed, understood, and featured in search results for the right terms, focus on the following:

• Fix technical SEO issues related to crawling, indexing, and user experience.
• Ensure mobile optimization across all digital properties.
• Deploy nested schema markup to enhance search visibility.
• Improve page speed for all web properties and optimize Core Web Vitals.
• Test cross-device compatibility.
• Implement proper canonicalization for multi-regional brands.
• Prioritize web accessibility by following ADA and WCAG guidelines to enhance user experience and search visibility.

Step 8: Engagement and conversion optimization

Utilize unified customer data to enhance user engagement and drive conversions:

• Deliver personalized content at scale for each audience segment in real time. Personalization strategies can be based on various factors such as marketing channel or campaign, visitor location, search intent, and past behavior. 
• Identify and deploy AI agents that assist audiences in quickly finding information, engaging in meaningful interactions, and making real-time decisions.
• Develop remarketing strategies informed by visitor behavior.
• Implement A/B testing across channels, ensuring consistent test and control groups.
• Measure performance across channels and optimize based on business goals and success KPIs. 

Step 9: Continuously test, measure, learn, and optimize

Refine your strategy through ongoing testing and data-driven adjustments to improve performance across all channels.

• Monitor performance metrics across all channels. Establish BI dashboards that connect and integrate data across channels.  
• Implement attribution models that effectively account for complex customer journeys.
• Regularly test new channel integrations and enhancements to the customer journey.
• Gather feedback from customers regarding their cross-channel experiences.
• Refine your strategy based on evolving search engine algorithms and changing customer behavior.

SEO’s role in delivering a unified, cross-channel experience

Integrating SEO into the omnichannel customer journey isn’t simply for improving search presence. 

Ultimately, it’s about creating discoverable, unified, and personalized experiences that guide customers naturally toward conversion. 

By implementing this nine-step framework, you can:

• Break down departmental silos.
• Align cross-functional teams around customer needs.
• Build truly seamless engagement models that drive sustainable growth.