Be both discoverable and recognisable

Ray says: “If you want to seriously influence your consumer moving forward, brand alone is not going to cut it.

We got into this mindset that brand was going to be key to driving SEO success, and it plays a huge part, but if you want to grow and stay top-of-mind, you need to drive demand and be discoverable. It's not just an awareness thing anymore. You need a combination of both. It's not enough to be known; you need to be found as well.

That means building brand and category salience. You've got to own your category in search so that, moving forward – with LLMs, AI search, and social search – you are the brand that has salience to the category that you want to be known for. You’re the one most closely related to that category.

This can’t just happen across Google. This needs to be across every searchable platform, because that's where intent starts now.”

Why is brand not enough in 2026?

“I’ll give you an example. We’ve recently started working with a quite large energy drink brand, here at Rise. Even though they have one of the biggest brands in the world, they don’t organically show up for the main term they want to target in the category they want to own, simply off the back of that brand. They've come to us to help them own that category within search.

From the studies we've done and the case studies that we have, category salience is the way to do that. That means being found on multiple different searchable platforms and using things like publications. A lot of it is almost taking what we did with SEO, but ramping it up with this new version of doing things that's evolving and adapting to all these different models, platforms, and consumer behaviours.

The algorithms just mirror that. A lot of people only follow what the algorithm is doing when really, if you follow consumer behaviour, that's what the algorithm is going to follow anyway.”

Why did you choose the word ‘salience’ when describing what a brand should be doing?

“With the category that you own, you want to stand out, but you also want to be similar to that. You want to be related to that category, and there are only a few ways that you can really do that.

Brands often build one version of their category that they want to be known for. They won’t actually do anything else to be known outside of that or be known in a way where they’re seen across multiple different touchpoints. We use the term ‘category salience’ because it’s about how easy and strongly something comes to mind when you think about the topic.

There was a study recently which showed that you need to be seen across four different touchpoints on six different platforms to build salience as a brand, from an awareness standpoint.

Often, brands will do things that drive demand and increase your branded search, but if you want to be seen on all these different search platforms and in the consumer's brain, you also need to be similar to, related to, and thought of strongly when they think of the thing that they want to buy.

If you think of ‘Ninja’, you think of ‘air fryer’. Therefore, when people search for ‘air fryer’, Ninja should be the brand that comes up. That's where demand and discovery come into it. Demand is driving people to search for your brand, and discovery is then being found when they do.

That's where category salience comes into this. To be a category leader, you need to have both of these working at the same time, whilst pushing yourself to own that category. You need to be understood as a brand, but that brand also needs to relate to whichever category you want to own at all times.”

Does your brand need to stand out on AI search engines as well as Google, and what elements make it more likely for that to happen?

“This actually comes down to audience insight and understanding who your audience and your customer are.

That starts with researching who they are, where they search, and what they search for. Often, when we do keyword or topic research, people just stick to Google. However, if you do a SERP analysis now, there are a bunch of other things being pulled in. You can get a weighting for which different phrases are being pulled in by which platform, based on the intent, the search term, and the topic.

For example, if you search for ‘best running shoes’, Google might pull a video from Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube review videos. We've understood this for a while, but now, in order to pop out and own that query, you need to own real estate on that Google search – whilst also owning real estate on that individual platform.

We did this for a fashion brand. We created a video that was search-optimized on TikTok, and it did really well on TikTok for the first 72 hours, but then it ended up getting a load of search directly within TikTok. The cool thing was that this was related to a Black Friday keyword, which is obviously quite competitive. Not only did it show up on TikTok, but it was also pulled into Google SERPs, so we ended up owning more real estate. Not only did we have organic rankings in roundups, listicles, articles, but we also had video rankings.

When you pop out and stand out, it's almost like you own the SERP for a certain keyword or phrase or topic. That's how you can own a category, by pulling in from all these different features.

This also massively impacts AI, from the studies we've seen so far. Ahrefs did one that focussed on publications and branded mentions and found that it was one of the most cited things within AI. Another recent study from Surfer SEO showed that YouTube, Instagram, and Meta were all being pulled and cited within different chatbots.

It's about influencing all these signals at scale, within a category that you want to own. That's how you stand out.”

Are you aiming to stand out in the Google SERPs, or are you trying to cover all your bases and be featured in as many places as possible?

“We think of it from more of a strategic point of view. If you’ve done the research, you should be able to get a good understanding of, first, how to make a really good search-optimized video that should do well in terms of engagement. Obviously, you can't predict virality, but it gives you an idea of how that's going to perform from an organic standpoint and a social media perspective.

If you've done the research and that SERP analysis, and the keywords you’re looking at mostly pull in videos, thumbnails, etc., you can then go back and say that you need to target YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn articles, or whatever it may be.

Also, if you’ve taken 50 to 1,000 queries for AI chatbots, where are they citing their sources from? Maybe they’re pulling in YouTube, LinkedIn, and a few publications. That helps you choose which ones to focus on, and based on those, you’re hoping a few of those will pop out.

The whole thing about popping out is that, when you own a SERP, you really do stand out in a category. You can see yourself multiple times, and you really own the real estate on that SERP.”

Do you still use keyword volume now, and how else can you measure demand?

“With keywords, you can use tools that show trending keywords, which shows the direct demand for that thing. Things like Glimpse, Google Trends, and even TikTok's Creator Search Insights will give you an idea of how people are searching over the last seven days to a month.

On the whole, keywords are still really important. They're data-backed, and they're becoming more important to other marketers outside SEO. Many times, when we've worked with a brand or even when I was in-house, we have started using keyword search data to influence product decisions, influence how campaigns were put together, how we were going to target, what consumers were actually interested in, and what type of content we were putting out outside of Google.

They’re really important, but we may move to a phase where we’re more interested in topics as a whole, rather than just keywords.”

Do you still use things like pillar keywords within your strategy, or do you take a basket of keywords and long tail questions and create content based upon that?

“A lot of this keyword research is still very similar to traditional keyword research. Now, it's just pulling in a lot more data points from different platforms as well.

You would use a bunch of different tools that pull in data for things like how people are searching on TikTok, YouTube, or Pinterest. Some of that will be done in the traditional way, relating to pillar keywords, secondary keywords, topic-level keywords, etc.

The difference is, in the same way you would map out a content strategy for a blog, you are mapping out that content, just across multiple different platforms.

Let's say you want to target people who need more energy in the gym. You might look and see that, based on your research, the pillar keyword might be ‘best energy drinks for health and fitness’. Then it might break down into, ‘How do I get more energy when I'm at the gym?’ and that might be searched on TikTok. So, you produce a piece of content there. ‘What's the best energy drink out of these two?’ might be a comparison piece where people are going to YouTube, and the purchase intent might be that they're going to a shop to buy it.

You’re mapping it out so that, instead of just putting it on a blog and having a spreadsheet related only to what’s being uploaded to your website, it's mapped out across all these different touchpoints across multiple different platforms. You can integrate that using creators, writers, in-house content creators, and the brand team, depending on your budget and availability.”

Do you recommend having a brand-building strategy for social, hand in hand with SEO, to build the brand and make it more likely that search results are clicked on?

“100%. In this new era of search, we as SEOs should be talking to our brand team a lot more. A few years ago (and even now, in some organisations), SEOs were so isolated from their teams.

We're at a point now where, although click-through rate is important, we're building salience with the brand and the category that you want to own. In order to do that, you need to be discoverable in search – whether that's across TikTok, YouTube, Google, or wherever that might be. However, you need to drive people to search for you as well.

Maybe you have a new product launch that you need to go and push more traffic towards, and it's there and it's easy and you're already ranking for it, but nobody is searching for it.

We worked with a client where we looked at their new product launch, we found the consumer they wanted to target, and we went out and created a bunch of content across all the different touchpoints. Before, you could see it was getting X amount of searches every month (which was quite a low amount for that non-branded keyword). After we did the campaign (and to this day), searches for that have increased, just on non-brand, and we also rank really well for it – above Amazon.

It really showed how important driving demand is, whilst being discoverable. You can have a really cool thing you already rank for and you're doing really well for, but if people don't know that they need it, there’s no point being there.

You need to work with your brand team and your social media team to make sure that, for the things you already have quick, easy wins with, you can go and own them.

Another interesting thing about that case study was that, not only was it able to drive demand for that product so that people went and searched for it, but we also saw a direct impact in it being picked up by publications, extra links, and mentions, which led to an increase in rankings as well. They work hand in hand.”

Why do you believe that content marketing is the future of search?

“When I say content marketing, I don't just mean blog-written content. I mean content marketing across video, search-based content, image content, etc. All these different forms of content are the future because that is what these models are trained on, what they're fed, and where they pull their data from. All the sources they're citing are different forms of content.

To own that, you need to create and distribute content at scale that relates back to your category, so that you can get picked up. It's going to become more important than ever. Even when people are looking for entertainment, outside of information from AI, they're going to be looking at content.

For marketing alone, content marketing is going to be really important, but it’s going to be key for search moving forward.”

Ray, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“If you want to own your category, go and speak to the other teams within your organisation.

Go and speak to your social team; go and speak to your PR team. Start that conversation today because it's going to be so important moving forward.”

Ray Saddiq is Global Head of Marketing at Rise at Seven. Find out more over at RiseatSeven.com.