Focus on your audience to avoid getting bogged down – with Emina Demiri-Watson

For Ashley Segura, you should be revisiting the way you think about your content and how your content is designed to meet the needs of your users through their entire journey. Ashley says: “Stop building content for ranking purposes and start thinking about content as assets for every stage of the user journey. By doing that, you’re going to build trust, address their questions, supply helpful information, and bring the user through the entire journey, to eventually convert them.”

For Ryan Jones, it’s not just about where your audience is likely to interact – it’s meeting them at the right place at the right time. Ryan says: “Leverage multi-channel SEO, along with customer journey matching for a two-pronged approach. First, you need to understand where your audience is, where they spend their time, what platforms they visit, where they communicate with other people, and where you can show up to generate the maximum amount of impact. The second prong is customer journey matching. You want to match where they are in their journey to the platform they're using. Some businesses might still find a lot of success with top-of-funnel content, social media posts, and generating interest on Reddit and similar platforms.

Bengu Sarica Dincer shares the importance of treating your brand as a multi-platform entity in 2026. Talking points include: What does treating your brand as a multi-platform entity actually mean? How do you treat your brand as a multi-platform entity? How does this interplay across search engines, social platforms, AI assistants, and niche communities? What search engines are key in 2026? Why do they like multi-platform entities? What social platforms are you referring to and how do you take advantage of social in this context? Where do AI assistants fit in? Why are niche communities important? How does it integrate into other marketing channels? How do you incorporate this into a plan? How do you measure success?

Once you identify who your audience is, Izabela Janczak shares that the next step is to learn more about the generation you’re targeting and to identify where they interact. Izabela says: “Meet your target generation where they search.” How would you define a generation, in this context? “You can start with the typical generations: Generation Z, Generation X, Boomers, Millennials, etc. Obviously, we're all quite familiar with the classic generational groups by now, because we hear more about them more than we ever used to before, and each of those generations has its own habits when it comes to searching for information or products.

The way that Casie Gilette understands more about her audience is to define an Ideal Customer Profile. Casie says: “Get hyper-specific about what your ICP (ideal customer profile) actually needs. The era of generic SEO content is over. AI overviews already own those answers. They already own those broad surface-level questions, and the only way to really stand out is to understand what your customers want. Who is your target audience? What do they want? What do they struggle with? What's missing from the AI summaries? What are the insights that they can't get anywhere else? I use the term ICP because I like the idea that you have an ideal customer: This is who they are. This is what they want. This is what they're asking. When you really break it down, that's who you want to be targeting, and that's who you're writing for. Understanding that is so important.”

Lazarina Stoy shares how to start understanding your users through research and query semantics. Lazarina says: “Learn how to incorporate and scale query semantics and user research, with the help of AI and machine learning.” What are query semantics? “Query semantics means understanding anything that relates to how users search. It's not just the words that are being typed, but also the context of where they're being typed, the device being used, the platform people choose, and why they choose it in different situations. It's also different types of user signals, like trends or the user’s search history.

Emina Demiri-Watson shares that focussing on your audience can help you avoid getting bogged down in what technology can offer. Emina says: “First of all, don't get bogged down with all of the flashy terms. We're all talking about fan-out, chunking, and cosine similarity. All of that is amazing, I love technology, but also go back to the basics of marketing and who your audience is. Those tools are brilliant as a way to help you understand your audience better, but they are not the goal in themselves. Understand the basics first.”

Silvi Nuñez shares that in an AI-heavy world where content feels generic, localized and culturally aware content becomes a powerful SEO strategy in 2026. Talking points include: What is localized and culturally aware content? How do you localize content as effectively as possible? How do we make content more culturally aware? How do we measure the impact of this? Why is this a powerful SEO strategy? How do we incorporate this as part of an overarching SEO strategy?

For Travis Tallent, it all begins with discovering who your audience is before deciding on how to serve them. Travis says: “Audience-first marketing has and will always win, no matter how technology advances. It's not a new concept, but it's more critical than ever. With AI entering the space, we are seeing huge shifts with AI and agentic search. The only way to thrive is to really understand your audience and how the people you are trying to reach search and find brands.”

It’s easy to get dazzled by the next shiny bright thing, but Tin Đudajek is keen to highlight the importance of delivering on ‘proper SEO’. Tin says: “Don't get lost in AEO or GEO, and keep doing proper SEO.” Answer Engine Optimization focuses on answering common questions and long tail queries that can appear in AI, so isn't that good for SEO? “It's good for SEO, but what I'm aiming at is that, currently, nothing exists that proves that optimizing solely for generative AI is different from real, proper SEO. What I'm trying to say is, just keep doing SEO as you have been doing so far, and you will be featured in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and everything else. As far as I've seen, there's nothing different that you have to do in order to rank better in generative AI right now.