Your digital team is optimizing for the wrong metric
Why most visibility strategies fail before they even begin—and what to measure instead
There’s a conversation that plays out, almost identically, in every company that grows large enough to afford a digital team. It goes like this:
The CEO asks, “How are we doing online?”
Marketing replies: “Fine, organic traffic is stable.”
End of conversation. End of analysis. End of opportunity.
The problem isn’t marketing. The problem is the question. “How are we doing?” assumes a single metric, a single channel, a single moment in the journey. But the actual behavior of users—the ones who eventually become customers—hasn’t worked that way for at least three years.
The moment Google stopped being the starting point
Until around 2020, a potential customer’s journey was predictable: need → Google search → landing page → contact. A linear funnel that agencies optimized with pinpoint precision.
That journey still exists. But it’s no longer the only one, and often it isn’t even the most common one.
Today, a professional evaluating a service provider does something different: they look them up on LinkedIn to see if they have a credible reputation, then check if they have videos on YouTube or clips on Instagram to see how they present themselves, and only if they pass these initial informal checks do they go to Google to search for their name and find their website.
This changes everything. Not because Google matters less, but because the work of persuasion happens long before the user gets there.
Branded search—how often your name is searched for directly—is now the most reliable signal that your content ecosystem is working. If that number grows, something upstream is
working well. If it’s flat or declining, you can have all the technical SEO in the world and it won’t matter much.
The framework I use with my clients: the three levels of visibility
I’ve stopped talking about “SEO and social” as two separate strategies. Instead, I talk about three sequential levels, each with a different logic, format, and metric.
The first level is discovery. It happens on social media, before the user knows who you are. The algorithm decides whether to distribute your content based on engagement signals—saves, viewing time, shares. They aren’t looking for you: they stumble upon you. The metrics that matter here are reach, save rate, and the growth of qualified followers (not in absolute terms: within the segment that matters to you).
The second level is confirmation. The user has already formed a first impression—positive, we hope—and goes to verify it. They search for your name on Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. This is where branded search comes in. If they find nothing consistent with the impression they formed at the first level, the journey ends. If they find authoritative content, it solidifies.
The third level is conversion. The user arrives at your site already oriented, already largely convinced. The site doesn’t need to convince them: it must not disappoint them. Time on page, quality of incoming leads, contact request rate: these are the metrics that matter.
The problem with most strategies is that they handle the third level well, the second reasonably well, and the first almost not at all. Yet it is the first level that fuels everything else.
What Actually Changes in Content Production
The temptation, once you understand this framework, is to “create more content.” That’s the wrong answer.
The right answer is to change the production logic: from “I create content to rank on Google” to “I create content that generates demand, and then I capture that demand.”
In practice, this means three things.
First: keyword research is no longer done solely on SEMrush. It’s done by looking at TikTok and YouTube’s internal search suggestions, the queries that emerge in comments, and recurring questions on LinkedIn. These are the real questions, expressed in the actual language of the people you’re interested in.
Second: the same core value is adapted into different formats for different contexts. Not “the same post on all channels”—that’s distribution, not strategy. A strong insight becomes a
60-second clip for social media, a well-argued thread for LinkedIn, an in-depth article for the blog. Each format serves a different stage of the journey.
Third: thematic consistency is more valuable than frequency. Platform algorithms tend to associate accounts with specific thematic areas. A profile that consistently addresses the same topic with increasing depth appears in search results for related queries far more often than one that posts frequently but in a scattered manner.
The question that highlights the problem
When I start a project with a company, I always ask this question: if one of your potential customers were searching for the problem you solve—not your name, but the problem—where would they find you?
On how many platforms would you appear? In what format? With what perceived authority?
The honest answer, in most cases, is: almost nowhere, unless we’re willing to pay for advertising.
And this isn’t a criticism of the team. It’s a consequence of a mindset that has remained static while user behavior has evolved.
The new model requires a broader view of what it means to “be found”—and greater clarity on where, really, the decision to contact you is made.
I work with companies and managers who want to build a digital presence that generates value over time, not just traffic. If this perspective interests you, the conversation can start here.
