Search Strategy Done Right: It’s Place, Not Promotion
Search has been miscast. It’s time to rethink search strategy.
Somewhere along the way, it began being treated like a performance channel. Like a tool for squeezing out more conversions from people already at the bottom of the funnel. Clicks, conversions, CPA, ROAS … the usual suspects. But the fundamental role of search isn’t promotional.
It’s distributional. In other words …
Search belongs in Place, not Promotion.
In the classic marketing mix, Place is about making your product easy to find and buy.
- In the physical world, that means store locations, shelf space, and stock availability.
- In the digital world, it means search. It’s your online shelf, your digital street corner, your access point.
If you’re not showing up when and where people are looking, you don’t exist. You’re not just losing sales; you’re not even being considered.
Despite this, many brands are still treating search as a last-mile conversion tool instead of making it a critical part of availability strategy. It doesn’t drive reach in the traditional sense, but it does ensure you’re findable in the moments that matter and across a wider spectrum of intent, not just at the point of purchase. In other words, it’s a search strategy for brand visibility, not just last-click ROI.
Search Strategy Isn’t Just About Converting
The logic behind performance marketing is seductive. Spend a dollar, make three. But it’s a narrow and increasingly misleading view of how brands grow.
In fact, what most attribution models don’t show is that many of those sales would have happened anyway. The person already knew the brand. They were already planning to buy. You just paid to intercept them on the way. That’s not value creation. That’s convenience at a cost.
Real growth happens when more people find you, more often. From building brand salience and from showing up across a much wider field of intent. Use search to expand your availability, not just squeeze your efficiency.
The Digital Shelf Isn’t Enough
Some will argue that being on the digital shelf is enough. However, the digital shelf isn’t a single store. It’s a sprawling, chaotic, algorithmically sorted marketplace. And showing up for a narrow set of high-converting keywords is like stocking your product in just a few stores in just a few cities and expecting national growth.
Essentially, if you limit your presence ito people already searching for your brand name or the obvious category terms, you risk playing in a puddle while the river flows past. Growth comes from visibility in broader category searches, competitor contexts, and vague early-stage queries. It comes from being there before people know exactly what they want.
And now, AI is about to upend that dynamic entirely.
Search is shifting from links and results to answers and recommendations
Summaries powered by large language models (LLMs) are starting to replace traditional listings. That means, if your brand lacks the strength, distinctiveness, or presence to surface in these systems, you simply won’t be seen. You won’t even be in the running.
This is going to reduce brand visibility across the board. Plus, it makes it even more expensive (and less effective) to try to “own every street corner” of digital real estate. You can throw budget at keywords, product listings, and short-term performance campaigns, but it doesn’t scale. It’s local dominance at national cost.
Advertising, by contrast, builds brand preference and mental availability. It gives you a fighting chance before someone types a word into the search bar, or asks their AI assistant for the best option. You earn a place on the shortlist before the algorithm decides what gets shown.
Search won’t save you if you haven’t built a brand first.
Is Search Even Necessary?
For some brands, particularly those with well-established distribution and no direct-to-consumer model, search might not be necessary. A CPG brand like Pepsi doesn’t need paid search unless it’s selling directly through Amazon or running a DTC operation. No one is typing “buy Pepsi online” as their gateway to conversion. It’s available everywhere. That’s the point.
Search has, in many ways, replaced directories advertising. Think Yellow Pages, but for the internet. A giant supermarket of plumbers, locksmiths, and local florists. Certainly, in the Yellow Pages era, you didn’t see brands like Pepsi buying full-page ads because they didn’t need to.
Search is incredibly effective for high-intent service categories. On the other hand, it’s irrelevant for brands that are already on the shelf, in the fridge, or in your basket.
Paid search should follow a need for discoverability, not substitute for availability.
The Misplaced Power of Performance
And here’s the real danger: organisations are increasingly handing control over Promotion to the people managing Place (performance marketers, search specialists, eComm leads). These teams decide where ad dollars go, what success looks like, and how to measure brand investment.
That’s a mistake.
Performance marketers are experts in optimisation and short-term conversion. Their world is built on dashboards, dials, and immediacy. But promotion (the job of brand-building) is long-term, cumulative, and requires a very different kind of evidence. Don’t capture it in a spreadsheet or let a day trader manage it.
This doesn’t mean brand investment is unmeasurable or purely emotional. In fact, some of the most robust marketing models we have assess the long-term effects of brand activity. But they use different timescales, different signals, and a kind of analytical rigour that many performance marketers simply haven’t learned.
When performance people are handed control over brand spend, we get an overly rational, ROI-obsessed version of marketing. Spend flows to the measurable, not the meaningful. Brand-building gets deprioritised. Campaigns get shorter, narrower, and flatter. And everything starts to look the same.
Performance data is valuable, but it’s only part of the picture. Building a brand requires evidence too, just not the kind that refreshes every 24 hours.
Search Is Distribution. Full Stop.
Search is infrastructure. It’s digital real estate. It should be treated like shelf space, store frontage, or logistics. It’s about making sure your brand is present and available, and not just optimised for last-click ROI.
Treating search as performance may generate short-term sales. But treating it as Place, as part of your availability strategy, will drive long-term growth.
What should you be doing?
- Resist the urge to chase only the most efficient clicks.
- Invest in upstream visibility, not just downstream capture.
- Make sure your brand shows up even when people aren’t searching for it by name.
AI is curating results, attention is fragmented, and the path to purchase is invisible. Being there is everything.
Final Thoughts
You can’t performance-market your way to scale.
Nor can you out-bid your competitors forever. Or win with tactics alone.
Growth comes from availability—mental and physical. From reach, not just response. From being present, not just efficient.
So get clear about what search really is: it’s Place. It’s distribution. It’s infrastructure.
And stop confusing that with Promotion. Optimising your way to the bottom of the funnel is a great way to end up invisible at the top.
