The digital customer: 10 keys to understanding your buyers today

Chapter 1 of the SEO from zero guide. Published in September 2019 and revised in August 2026: we added a fifth moment — the stretch from 2019 to now — and completed the ten keys the title promised and the original text only half delivered.

Access to the internet and to social platforms changed how we relate to each other and, along the way, how we relate to brands. We are no longer a brand’s customers: we are digital customers.

Tell someone twenty years ago that they would be checking a job application every two hours on a platform that connects employers with employees, and they would not have believed it. It happened seemingly all at once, and it is worth mapping what each step actually changed, because each one left behind a habit that is still with us.

Some people explain this with web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. We prefer to tell it as moments, because what matters is not the label but what changed in people’s behaviour.

Moment 1: closing the distance

The early internet was remote: there was “something” called email and a few search engines named Yahoo, Altavista and Google. It was expensive, slow and awkward to connect — it tied up the phone line — and for most people it was unnecessary.

There were no communities: content was consumed, not produced. Answers from that archaic internet were worse than the ones in a CD-ROM encyclopedia. The best thing about the era was the sound of the modem, which now feels exotic.

What mattered: people did not yet understand what the internet was for. Its usefulness was hard to explain unless you had family on the other side of the world.

Moment 2: digital communities

Instant messaging arrived, and so did connections that did not tie up the phone. Google was bigger and answered better. We discovered you could make friends in forums and chat rooms.

At that point time stopped being time and became real time. Messenger changed how we related to each other: for the first time we kept talking to schoolmates after school, and being online stopped being an event and became a state.

What mattered: developers understood that the internet was not a tool but the base other tools were built on. And with that came the idea of profiling a digital customer and selling to them.

Moment 3: the mobile internet

On 29 June 2007 Apple put the first iPhone on sale: a phone that was also a music player, a camera and a browser, built for people who were not experts. Other “smartphones” existed before it — Moto Q, BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Nokia E62 — but they shared the same traits: hard to use, with a keyboard stealing space from the screen.

For the first time we could reach the internet anywhere, at any moment. That is when the internet became ubiquitous, and everything changed for good.

What mattered: the internet stopped being something you switched off at night. It came to bed, to the bathroom and on holiday, and it became a tool for the user, not only for the person writing the code.

Moment 4: the social and commercial internet

Here the word “internet” fades and the platforms take over. It was no longer about consuming content: it was about creating and sharing, with social validation built in.

Our circles expanded well beyond the fifty people we actually spoke to. And we started buying online, and rating whoever sold to us.

What mattered: digital became a second social and commercial dimension. We are more connected than ever and, at the same time, lonelier. Brands compete for saturated attention, and the ones that win are not the ones that capture it but the ones that answer a real search.

Moment 5: from 2019 to now

The original text stopped here, in 2019. What came next deserves its own moment.

Short video swallowed a large share of research time, messaging turned into a sales channel, and a growing portion of searches now ends without a click: the answer shows up in the search results themselves, these days generated by AI. At the same time, consent and privacy stopped being small print and started shaping what can be measured at all.

What mattered: attention fragmented further and the click stopped being guaranteed. Showing up still counts, but now you have to earn the click too.

The ten keys

1. Digital is not one more channel. It is part of your customer’s reality and buying habits. Treating it as an add-on produces strategies that do not match how people actually live.
2. The internet is a place where you can help someone live better, by giving them useful information amid the noise. That is the way in — not the catalogue.
3. Recall is decided at the moment of the search. Not being there hands your competitor an advantage you pay for later.
4. No digital presence means no shop window. It stopped being optional: it is where people check whether you exist and whether you solve their problem.
5. Brands are no longer institutions, they are living organisms. People expect them to reply, to be present, and to resolve things within a reasonable time.
6. Your advertising no longer depends only on you. It depends on what your customers say: reviews, recommendations and screenshots weigh more than your own message.
7. The decision starts long before the purchase. There are three or four earlier searches — orientation, comparison, doubts — and that is where the supplier is chosen, not on the pricing page.
8. The journey hops between devices and gets interrupted. It starts on a phone on the way home and finishes on a laptop two days later. A funnel that assumes a single session measures badly and decides worse.
9. Trust is verified, not declared. Before contacting you, someone will check reviews, case studies, dates, and whether your site looks maintained. Every one of those is part of the pitch.
10. Speed is part of the brand experience. A slow site does not read as a slow site: it reads as a company that is not serious. The patience you could count on in 2019 is gone. Chapter 5 brings this down to concrete decisions.

The digital customer wants exactly what the non-digital one wanted: their problem solved. The difference is that now, if you solve it well, they bring you more customers — and if you solve it badly, they tell everyone.

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Next chapter: Access to information: how search engines changed the world · Guide index