Key Takeways:
- Experience your brand from an outside perspective
- Develop more effective touchpoints for customers
- Use a better understanding of customer intent across different channels to optimise content at different points in the journey to different key words
- Locate pain points for customer and improve them to increase likelihood of purchase and retention
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a visual tool that represents the 5 stages of a customer’s journey from becoming aware of your businesses products or services, to making a purchase, to advocating for your brand.
What is the purpose of a customer journey map?
To visualize the steps customers take from awareness to advocacy.
An Example of customer journey mapping use: Imagine a customer searching for eco-friendly cleaning products. A journey map would represent what they might search during their awareness stage (searching ‘why eco-friendly matters’), consideration stage (‘best eco-friendly brands’), and decision stage (‘buy eco-friendly cleaner online’)
What to Include in a Customer Journey Map (With Examples)
Five Stages of the Journey
The five core stages are:
-
Awareness:
Customer realizes a need or problem.
In context: Searching “Why is sustainable packaging important?”
2. Consideration:
Customer compares solutions.
In context: Googling “Top eco-friendly packaging suppliers.”
3. Decision:
Customer chooses and buys.
In context: Visiting your product page and searching “Buy compostable packaging online.”
4. Retention:
Customer uses the product and seeks support.
In context: Looking for “How to store compostable packaging.”
5. Advocacy:
Customer shares feedback or recommends.
In context: Posting a review or searching “Leave review for [brand].”
Customer Goals and Pain Points at Each Stage
NOTE: A pain point is a point along the buyer journey for your product at which a customer had difficulty or did not find enjoyable.
Awareness
Goal: Understand the problem and possible solutions.
Pain Point: Overwhelmed by too much, irrelevant information.
Consideration
Goal: Compare options and find the best fit.
Pain Point: Lack of access to reviews, lack of transparent pricing
Decision
Goal: Make a confident purchase.
Pain Point: Issue finding where to pay.
Retention
Goal: Get maximum value from the product.
Pain Point: Difficulty finding help or troubleshooting.
Advocacy
Goal: Share positive experience easily.
Pain Point: No clear way to submit reviews or testimonials.
3. Touchpoints for each stage (Where Customers Interact with Your Brand):
Awareness: Blog post commenting, social media ad clicks, YouTube video linking or commenting, clicks on organic search results.
Consideration: Comparison page clicks and referencing, webinars, downloadable guides, email nurture campaigns.
Decision: Product pages, pricing calculators, live chat, checkout process.
Retention: Knowledge base, onboarding emails, customer support portal.
Advocacy: Review platforms, referral programs, social media engagement.
Example: A SaaS company might see awareness touchpoints on LinkedIn ads, consideration touchpoints on a “Top 10 CRM tools” blog, and decision touchpoints on its pricing page.
After including these three aspects into a visual representation of the customer journey, you are ready to use it to improve the experience.
Improving SEO based on the customer journey: Optimising content for different stages
For each stage of the customer journey that you map, you should target different supporting keywords that align with the user intent.
Awareness
Content: Educational blogs, explainer videos, infographics.
Keywords: “What is [topic]?”, “Benefits of [solution].”
Consideration
Content: Comparison guides, case studies, buyer checklists.
Keywords: “[Product] vs [Competitor]”, “Best [solution] for [industry].”
Decision
Content: Product landing pages, pricing tables, testimonials.
Keywords: “Buy [product] online”, “[Product] pricing.”
Retention
Content: FAQs, tutorials, troubleshooting guides.
Keywords: “How to use [product]”, “[Product] setup guide.”
Advocacy
Content: Review request emails, success stories, referral program pages.
Keywords: “[Product] reviews”, “Customer success stories.”
But as with anything in marketing or the digital world, things keep evolving. A new model being discussed represents the customer journey in a slightly different, AI driven way.
A new vision of the customer Journey: The Loop
Retention / Loyalty:
After purchase, the focus shifts to delivering value, ensuring satisfaction, and nurturing the relationship to encourage ongoing loyalty and repeat business.
Advocacy:
Loyal, happy customers evolve into brand advocates, sharing positive experiences and recommending your business to others—creating new awareness and restarting the cycle for future prospects.
The loop involves all the same steps as the traditional customer journey map; the main differentiator is the recognition that customers don’t just travel through these stages in order, or just once. Many people skip stages, circle back around and end up being an unconscious ambassador for your brand.
The newly proposed loop views customer journey mapping as continuous rather than linear. Its recognition that the journey to purchase and beyond may start anywhere in the loop is powered by AI.
Awareness:
The customer becomes aware that they have a problem or need and begins discovering possible solutions—your brand included.
Consideration:
They start comparing different options, evaluating features, benefits, pricing, and overall fit to determine which solution best meets their needs.
Decision / Purchase:
The customer selects their preferred solution and completes their first purchase, officially becoming a buyer.
Why Does Customer Journey Mapping Make SEO More Efficient?
- It results in more accurate keyword targeting across the funnel (or around the loop).
Your new, comprehensive understanding of the customer life cycle enables you to aim certain branches of your campaign to specific stages of the decision to buy.
For example, User A, who is in the initial awareness stage may search ‘how to cure joint pain’, while User B in the decision stage may search ‘is brand name a reliable option.’
Both users are looking for the same solution, but are in different stages of the customer lifecycle. An understanding of their intent (are they trawling for options or for confirmation that your brand is the right pick?) enables you to select ‘join pain cure’ over a branded or validation approach.
- Higher engagement and lower bounce rates. Mapping the customer experience will lead to your natural understanding of customer attitude toward certain CTAs at different stages of your campaign.
For a customer at the awareness or consideration stage, a buy now option would be misplaced on a blog. You should instead consider linking to reviews that compare your product or service with others. These options are suddenly relevant to potential customers, resulting in higher engagement with said content.
- Improved conversion rates through relevant content.
Users will be more likely to feel their intent is understood – something increasingly desired with the rise of AI that fulfills just that – if they are immediately presented with relevant content due to optimisation for the correct keywords for their search stage.
More people will take the opportunity to convert if a relevant option is right in front of them.
- Long-term SEO benefits from advocacy and user-generated content.
Upon completion of the customer lifecycle, the aim is for users to become advocates for your brand. Putting in the SEO work to optimise content for the relevant consumer stage pays off later, as people mention your brand online later down the track, collating long term SEO benefits.
Why is Customer Journey Mapping Helpful in 2026?
The current marketing situation can be described as the liminal space between traditional search volume data driven SEO and highly varied user AI prompting.
Given the lack of data for the exact key words or queries used in these prompts, it is critical to instead consider the customer and their intent at every stage.
In the absence of data, logic and people-based strategy can still be the basis of good SEO. Optimising content for different stages of user intent with a product or service will result in more of your content being user relevant, and therefore it will garner more engagement.
You should elevate the quality of your AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) to increase your ranking on AI searches. As well as the customer journey mapping resulting in more relevance, it often brings a more conversational element to your content overall. A greater variety of content (catering to the different stages of customer journeys) means a richer source of information from which to pull conversational language, a prevalent style of prompting AI.
A final note
Customer journey mapping isn’t just a marketing exercise. It’s the foundation for smarter, more efficient SEO. By aligning your content and keywords with real customer needs at every stage, you create a seamless experience that drives traffic, builds trust, and converts more effectively.
About the Author: Chris Clarke
