We spotted a Google update recently that really got us talking in the office. On the face of it, it doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but the more we looked into it, the more we started to think this could actually be quite a significant one for businesses.
Google Search Console has introduced something called Platform Properties, which basically means businesses and creators can now connect social accounts including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X and see how content from those platforms is performing within Google Search.
That in and of itself is useful. But the bit that really caught our attention is that you can start to see what people are actually searching on Google when your social content appears in the results.
And that’s where our brains started ticking.
Because for years we’ve treated Google and social media as two fairly separate parts of digital marketing. Google is where you think about SEO, websites and keywords, while Instagram and TikTok are where you create content, build a community and hopefully get discovered.
But if someone can Google something and end up discovering one of your Instagram posts, are they really that separate anymore?
And perhaps more importantly, what could businesses do with that information?
Imagine knowing why someone found you…
Let’s say you’re a florist and you’ve been posting Reels showing wedding bouquets, behind-the-scenes clips from wedding mornings and the occasional video answering questions couples regularly ask you.
Normally, you’d head into Instagram Insights and see how many people watched a Reel, whether they liked it, saved it or shared it and perhaps whether it brought you some new followers. That’s all useful information, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what that person was looking for when they found you.
Now imagine opening Search Console and seeing that one of those Instagram posts appeared when somebody Googled “wedding florist Middlesbrough” or “colourful wedding bouquet ideas.”
Suddenly, we know something much more interesting than the fact that the Reel got 5,000 views. We know what somebody actually wanted when they discovered it.
That’s the bit we think businesses should be paying attention to, because it immediately opens up another conversation. What else are people searching before they find your content? Are they searching for your business name, asking questions about your industry or looking for a particular service? Could something you posted six months ago quietly appear in Google results without you even realising?
And once you know that, the obvious question becomes: what should you create next?
Because “what should I post?” is still one of the biggest questions businesses ask us…
Anyone who works in marketing will probably have been asked this approximately 4,000 times, and we completely understand why. Coming up with content week after week can be difficult, particularly when social media is only one of about 700 things you’re trying to do while running a business.
But some of the best content ideas don’t come from sitting down and desperately trying to think of something clever. They come from understanding what your customers already want to know.
What are they asking you? What are they confused about? What are they worried about before buying? What are they searching for when they’re trying to solve the problem your business exists to solve?
Search data has always been brilliant for answering some of those questions, but this update gives businesses another little window into that behaviour by showing the relationship between Google searches and their social content.
So instead of opening Canva on a Monday morning and thinking “Right… what on earth are we posting this week?”, you could potentially look at the searches that are already leading people towards your business and build content around them.
For us, that’s where this stops being an interesting new dashboard and starts becoming genuinely useful marketing information.
It also made us think about the whole “social media SEO” conversation…
We’ve all heard a lot about social media becoming more searchable over the last few years. We’ve been told to use keywords in captions, put relevant text on videos, optimise profiles and make it clear what our content is actually about.
And sometimes, if we’re being fair, advice like that can make marketing sound much more complicated than it needs to be. Small businesses already have enough to think about without wondering whether every Instagram caption has been sufficiently “SEO optimised.”
But this Google update does make the reasoning behind some of that advice much easier to understand.
If you’re an independent coffee shop in Newcastle, for example, there is probably some value in occasionally using the words “independent coffee shop in Newcastle” within your content rather than assuming everyone, and every platform, will somehow work that out from a caption saying “Monday mood”.
That doesn’t mean every caption suddenly needs to sound as though it was written for a search engine. Please don’t do that. People still want to follow people and businesses with personality, not keyword databases.
But there is a really interesting middle ground emerging where we’re creating content that feels completely natural to a human while also making it incredibly easy for platforms to understand what the business does, where it is and what it knows about.
And that feels even more important when you look at what’s happening to Google itself.
Because Google is changing too, and this is where things get really interesting…
There’s been a lot of conversation about the future of Google and the move towards a much more AI-led search experience. Google itself talks about combining the best of traditional search with the best of AI, and we’re already seeing that direction through things like AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Traditionally, using Google has been fairly straightforward. We’d type a few words into a search box, get a list of results, choose a website and start looking for the answer ourselves.
Now we’re increasingly able to ask Google much more conversational questions and have AI help research, organise and explain the answer for us. We can ask follow-up questions, search using images, compare options and give Google much more context about what we’re actually trying to find.
And when you think about that from the perspective of a business, it raises a pretty big question.
What happens when being found on Google isn’t just about ranking number one anymore?
Imagine someone searches for “Where’s a good independent restaurant in Middlesbrough for a date night?”
In a traditional search world, we’d probably be thinking about which restaurant website ranks highest for those keywords. In an increasingly AI-led search world, Google is trying to understand what that person actually means and pull together useful information to help them make a decision.
There are potentially lots of places online that could help it do that: the restaurant’s website, Google reviews, social profiles, videos, articles, customer recommendations and information elsewhere across the web.
Suddenly, a business’s digital presence starts to look much more connected.
And that’s what we’re particularly curious about.
Maybe we’ve been separating our marketing too much
For years, marketing plans have neatly divided everything into different sections. SEO over here, social media over there, website somewhere else and reviews somewhere near the bottom of the to-do list that we’ll definitely get around to eventually.
But customers have never really behaved that neatly.
Think about the last time you discovered a new business. Maybe somebody mentioned it in a TikTok, so you looked at its Instagram. Then you Googled it, checked the reviews, visited the website and went back to Instagram to follow it. Three weeks later, when you actually needed what it sold, you finally made the purchase.
At no point during that process were you thinking, “Excellent, I’ve now progressed from the awareness stage of this company’s social media funnel into organic search.” 😂
You were just checking them out.
That’s why we wonder whether thinking about all these channels completely separately is starting to make less sense. To a potential customer, your website, Instagram account, TikTok videos, reviews and Google presence are all just different pieces of the same business.
And increasingly, it looks as though the technology connecting all of those pieces is getting better at understanding that too.
Could small businesses actually have an advantage here?…
This is probably the part we’re most interested to watch, because small businesses have something that huge brands can spend enormous amounts of money trying to manufacture: real, first-hand knowledge of their customers.
A mortgage broker knows the questions first-time buyers are embarrassed to ask. A dentist knows exactly what nervous patients worry about before they walk through the door. A restaurant owner hears the same questions before bookings every week, while a florist knows the things couples suddenly panic about three months before their wedding.
That knowledge might feel completely ordinary when you deal with it every day, but it’s expertise, and it makes brilliant content.
If people are starting to search in more conversational ways and AI-powered search is trying to find genuinely useful information to answer increasingly specific questions, we can’t help but wonder whether businesses that consistently share that real-world knowledge are going to be in a particularly strong position.
We don’t think that means suddenly creating hundreds of pieces of content purely because you want Google to notice you. If anything, we think it comes back to something much simpler: be useful, be clear and talk about the things you genuinely know.
So what are we actually going to do with this update?
We’re going to play with it.
That’s one of the best things about working in digital marketing, something changes, we get curious, we test it and then we start figuring out what it actually means in the real world.
We’ll be connecting social accounts to Search Console, watching what information comes through and looking for patterns. We want to see which searches lead people to social content, which posts Google is surfacing and, probably most interestingly, whether there are any surprises in there.
Because imagine discovering that people are regularly searching for something connected to your business that you’ve barely ever spoken about. Or that a Reel you posted months ago is appearing for a search you hadn’t even considered targeting.
That’s the kind of information we’d want to take straight back into the content plan.
Analytics shouldn’t just be numbers that get copied into a report at the end of every month. They’re clues about what people are interested in, and the useful bit happens when you actually do something with them.
Which leaves us wondering…
For years we’ve talked about “doing SEO” as though it has a very clear boundary around it. Of course, websites, technical SEO, keywords and search strategy aren’t suddenly disappearing, they’re still hugely important, but that boundary is starting to look a little blurrier.
If Google can understand your website, discover your Instagram posts, surface your TikToks and YouTube videos, look at reviews and use information from across the web to help answer someone’s question, where does SEO actually start and stop anymore?
We’re not completely sure yet.
And that’s actually why we find this update so interesting.
Maybe the businesses that do well in this next version of search won’t necessarily be the ones trying hardest to “do SEO.” Maybe they’ll simply be the businesses that consistently make it really easy for people, and platforms, to understand who they are, what they do and what they know.
Useful content, clear messaging, genuine expertise and a strong presence wherever their customers are looking for them.
It’s funny, really. Digital marketing seems to get more technologically complicated by the month, yet somehow the conversation always seems to bring us back to the basics.
Know your customer. Be useful. Make it easy for people to understand what you do.
Maybe Google is changing more than it has in decades.
But perhaps good marketing hasn’t changed quite as much as we think.
And we’d love to know what you think: do you already think about your social content as part of your Google presence, or have social media and SEO always felt like two completely separate things?
