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- [00:00]
A
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.
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B
Nearly 60% of Google searches in the US now end without a click. So if SEO still stops at rankings and traffic, you're missing the bigger story. The real opportunity now is understanding what users do across search, social reviews, and even on site behavior. Building better experiences from that is what we're going to talk about today. I'm Jordan Cooney and joining me today is Celeste Gonzalez, SEO Testing Director at Rickety Roo and even more importantly, founder of the LA SEO Meetup Group. Today, Celeste and I are talking about search experience optimization, why SEOs need to get scrappy with the data they already have, and how building your own tools can uncover insights. Traditional platforms still Ms. Celeste. Welcome to the Voice of the Search Podcast.
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C
Hey, thank you for having me, Jordan. I'm really excited to chat with you today.
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B
Likewise. This is going to be a ton of fun. I've been watching your work and watching you grow in the SEO community over the past few years. I think we met at Google I O, if I'm not mistaken, or at least got really familiar with one another at Google I o and I really appreciate your approach to wanting to educate and inform the SEO community. And secondly, I'm just incredibly grateful for you to continue building local communities for SEOs, content marketers, and the changes that are happening in our industry. So kudos to you for doing phenomenal work for our industry. I. I want to start off by just having you introduce yourself to, to our audience, tell us a little bit about your. Your background and, and, and your experience in the SEO space.
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C
Yeah. So, I mean, thank you for the very nice introduction, of course. Let's see where I got started. I was actually a blogger, so I had my own blog. I tried to learn as much as possible and that need for community was just sort of always there. And I was very grateful that Twitter was really active at the time. So that's how I was able to connect with so many great people. And it kind of started me sharing Everything that I was learning with others, I saw. People were sharing what they were working on. People would give critiques, those sorts of things. I would just share what was happening on my blog, what I was doing, whatever I had learned, putting into practice, started freelancing and then eventually ended up at Rickety Roo. I've been there for almost five years, working mainly in the local space. Worked my way up from junior SEO specialist to now leading the testing department there. And it's just been really amazing to connect with so many people like yourself who, I mean, you and Sean are the main reasons why the LA SEO Meetup Group exists now. So thank you for that.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. I'm, I'm curious as we, as you dive into like kind of your, your background and, and where you started, one of the things I think is, is unique is that there's been so much change in SEO in the last 24 months or so. But even, even before that, over the last maybe five years, we already saw kind of some, some key indicators that the serps were going to change the way that experiences to users who are trying to discover information, content, local businesses, was going to change. Right. And you've been working at the forefront of watching and monitoring that. And so when you talk about testing and seeing all this change, what has been like one of the most consequential changes that you've witnessed in this past, say, 12 months or so? And why do you think that your experience in testing helps you be prepared for future changes?
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C
Yeah, I just say maybe it's a little basic, but the importance of reviews and not just review count, but in what these reviews are saying. Because on the local side, it's just exactly where the things are getting pulled in. First for some new AI features like Ask Maps about this place for your gbp. And now recently, this week they announced Ask Maps is just a conversational search on Google Maps in general. So while reviews have always sort of been important in the local SEO space, but in the past 24 months, the way I think people are talking about reviews has changed a lot. And in seeing, you know, those reviews getting pulled up, you have Ask Maps about this place on a gbp. A user uses it on Google Maps and they have these preloaded questions and it's pulling first and foremost from the reviews and it's all based on the language that these customers are using. So it's been really great to just see a lot of content focused on that from other SEOs and what we've been sharing, what we've been working on.
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B
I love that. And I think it does open the door to conversations. Right. I mean, that's the whole beauty of building community, whether it be locally in la, going to a bunch of our industry events, and in staying within the industry and connecting with people. One of the concepts that you've been pushing to get people more connected is this Search Experience Optimization or this SXO concept. Tell our audience what that means to you and what you've been sharing at different events about this concept.
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C
Yes. So Search Experience Optimization. I first read about this acronym and what it is from Sarah Fernandez Carmona, and she actually has a book about it. It's only in Spanish right now, so only Spanish speakers will be able to read it. But it is just the focus on sort of combining SEO and UX principles for your strategy. And I think it's developed a lot more to encompassing sort of what people are talking about when they talk about AEO or geo. And with the acronym fatigue, I totally get it. For people who might be resistant on hearing something like Search Experience Optimization or sxo, I feel like it is probably the best way to sort of discuss what we are doing right now, because we are optimizing for user experiences. We are trying to get them to. Yes. I mean, for some cases make it to the website, other cases, you know, it's not happening anymore, but eventually convert from an organic channel and it doesn't matter. You know, SEO, search engine optimization, focusing on where it's coming from, where. Right now we're just focusing on the user experience and how they get there. Because obviously Google is different from ChatGPT. You're going to have different types of users coming from there and you're just optimizing for the experience overall, no matter which place it was from.
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B
So one of the things I think is remarkable around this search experience optimization concept is looking at these other channels, but looking at them from the lens of what do they mean for your brand and how does it resonate with your audience? Because each of these social channels in particular, they have, at this particular point, their maturity is at a place where they have specific audiences and you can reach certain types of consumers in them. So when you're working with small businesses or small business owners, like, how do you ensure that they're making the right decisions here? Because oftentimes, especially for a local business, they don't have the resources to go and do Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channel, podcast. All of a sudden it's like, I can't do any of this. Instead of I just need to do some of this for my brand to be recognized.
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C
Yeah, yeah. It's sort of like keeping up with the Joneses sometimes with like such a small budget and trying to make sure it's like, well, I should all these things. I truly think that it's going to depend on the industry, even within small and local businesses. You know, you have, let's say, a restaurant or catering business. Absolutely. TikTok makes sense for that because it is just, you know, a visual platform. People want to go and see beautiful things, they want to see beautiful food, they want to see a beautiful atmosphere. You know, that's the type of person that might be searching for restaurants in their own area or while they're traveling. And, you know, when you have home services, that's where it gets a little tricky. It's not necessarily like, okay, let's just start a podcast about plumbing at this point and think like, that's going to lead someone to, you know, pick up the phone and schedule service. What I've noticed with one of my home services clients is that TikTok and Instagram have actually been working decently for them and they post sort of educational content on there and also just like gross content. So it's like, you know, plumbing stuff. Like, people just are like, oh, that's disgusting. You're unclogging a drain. Gross. And yeah, of course you can say like, okay, vanity metrics. People are just watching. Or people are just like, you know, following because of that. But it does lead to things down the line because you are top of mind. I don't think it has to be so quick cut and dry, like, okay, they found you, they follow you, they're going to make a purchase from you or they're going to schedule service. It takes much longer for that to happen. And I think what's really important is looking at competitors in your space as well as in your local area to try to see what they're doing and maybe even look to other companies as inspiration. So, you know, maybe if you are just a smaller local business in a state where the population is not as huge, you might want to go look at, you know, similar businesses in LA or in New York and see what they're doing where they do have more budgets, more people, and take it as inspiration.
- [11:05]
B
Right. And I want to dig in a little bit further here because I think one of the most interesting perspectives you have around this is that you're getting real user insights out of this. Right? You're getting real user data. And I. And I've and I've talked, I've talked a lot about this is like you should be looking at your own AI traffic over any other signal. However, sometimes, especially with local businesses, you're not getting any AI traffic. So looking at where you have real signals, like real social engagement is a clear indicator of something that's working. It's a clear indicator of a piece of content that will likely work in AI, will likely work in, in traditional search. And so to your whole point behind all of this, many of these social channels are already vital places for how to think about our AI strategy. And I want to get your perspective on any use cases or examples of how you can turn that insight from a social channel into a real search or AI LLM, AI Discovery Channel strategy.
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C
So like we talked about what sort of like the consistency there in preparing just for like a multimodal world of search. You know, you see AI overviews, they're pulling in YouTube videos, they're pulling in TikTok. You know, they can pull in different social channels, but also just on the local side of things, thinking of your gbp, GBP posts still exist. You can still upload photos and videos there. So looking at socials and seeing what has performed well and you can try testing that to see if it would also do something for your GBP at that point, upload it as a post, see if that can get people to actually interact with it and maybe book a service or use that, you know, for coupon post whatever it is, posting it on photos and videos, making sure that the information is distributed well across platforms so it could get cited. You know, you're just reinforcing that like, oh, this video. Yes, it mattered here on TikTok, but it also mattered, mattered on Instagram and mattered on YouTube. And maybe you might want to embed that on a page on the site if it is relevant and see if that does affect user behavior. You know, are users then clicking on the video on the page? When you use some sort of user behavior tracking tool, you can see that and then just seeing how that affects actions further down the line.
- [13:30]
B
Yeah, I think this is like one of the key unlocks for us as an SEO community is that historically we used to look at the world as this like crawl index, rank traffic world. But that's like completely broken now and there's all these different intersections where we're getting useful data, whether it be social signals, whether it be different traffic sources even. There's a lot of insight and knowledge in looking at your own direct traffic and understanding how your direct traffic is a reflection of your brand, a reflection of your website, and using that as a tool to better understand how you can scale your overall traffic. All these different new ways of tracking and measuring leads me to kind of our next topic, which is you've been building your own tools and your own ways of collecting this data. Everything from like sentiment analysis to combining different data into specific workflows. I'm curious, you've been doing this in a really scrappy and creative way. Why should SEOs, why should marketers now learn these skills and have these skills in order for them to be successful when it comes to the new ways of discovery?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think it's at this point with the technology that we have, it's really important to just mess around and find out if it'll work, if it won't work, really, you know, there's kind of no excuse to not figuring things out at this point. And it doesn't have to be anything extremely complicated. I have a zero code background, so my tools that I've created are completely vibe coded. It's a huge learning process. But it, I mean, it was really not that crazy. As things have gotten better, you know, I used cursor before, now I use Claude code even easier. And you know, that's all recent stuff. And I believe things are only going to get easier for us to build. And the importance of that is a lot of people are obviously focused on the data we don't have and what, you know, what we're missing out on. So at this point, if you can try to pull data from different sources and create your tools to do that and look at things in a different way, you know, why not? You're creating something you're trying versus lamenting on the fact that we are missing out on things. So like with the Chrome extension I created, it's focusing on GBP reviews and in doing sentiment analysis and review velocity. So you're able to find out, you know, positive, neutral, negative reviews gives you a score. This is for like the past 90ish days and comes up with content opportunities and recommendations based on those reviews. But the real value of it for me was in getting to use it for competitor reviews. And you know, at that point you can use the competitor data to your advantage because whatever their weaknesses might be, they could be your client's strengths. And that's something you really want to hit hard and reinforce on the website, reinforce on socials, you know, just test out what's going to work there. So, yeah, I mean I think that's what I have to say on it.
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D
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B
I appreciate that. And I want to dive into something you mentioned like you're vibe coding a lot of these capabilities out and you're not necessarily just doing everything in a way that is like perfectly sustainable or like a long term tracking platform or system. So tell me about the risks of that. But then the rewards you're seeing when you're using these data visualizations or assets with your clients.
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C
Yeah, I mean things will break. It's eventually just going to happen to you. At some point you might break it, or if it's something that you've created internally you're sharing with the team, a team member might break it. And that's totally okay. You can still fix it. I guess it's just being prepared for when that happens. The other thing that that's an issue that just happens is like with the API pull request, you could get a big bill if you do that wrong. So you just want to make sure that you're okay on that end too. But I'd say it's really important to just ask whatever platform you're using, if it is Claude code, if it is cursor to sort of build in checks for yourself. So like, when I have built Colab notebooks to merge data sources together, I have everything done like step by step in code blocks versus everything written as one. So I can know exactly which step broke. So then I can troubleshoot with Claude code or cursor to clean that up. And it's also really helpful to just ask Claude code to explain each step to you and explain what it's doing and why, and have some sort of knowledge document for you. So that way you know, you can at least understand as much as you can about whatever it is that you're building. So when it inevitably breaks, you have a starting point.
- [20:18]
B
And so the breaking component is one thing, right? And like, I think that's the fear factor that a lot of people have when it comes to of vibe coding. But one of the things that I find remarkably useful is this just speeds things up. We get information and data to people so much sooner. Right. And I want to maybe see if you can share some of like, maybe the lightweight tools or some of the basic ways that we can go from nothing to something and how that helps a local business owner, an SEO, a marketer, and a team somebody move faster with what they want to accomplish.
- [20:54]
C
I'd say just think about whatever is the most tedious thing that you wish you could put off your plate and try to build something that will help with a step in that if you know, not the entire process, it doesn't have to be anything huge, it doesn't have to be anything that necessarily you'd even deem groundbreaking. Like, the first Collab reports that I built were just like, okay, let's have this giant data set and we're gonna pull just the striking distance keywords from here and then generate, you know, bar graphs of like buckets of those keywords per subfolder on the site. It's not anything crazy there, but it helps speed up time so I don't have to manually look at something like that. And I'm absolutely horrible at creating any sort of visualizations for the data. So just using Python to be able to get to do that already speeds up my process. I have something nice for the client to look at if I were to report on things in that way. So I just say start very small and literally just start prompting and see what it says. But at this point, if you are just starting, I would say go straight to Claude code versus cursor.
- [22:09]
B
Love it, love it, love it, love it. Let's switch themes here for a Second, and let's go into something that is maybe a little bit more broad for our audience and listeners. And one of the things that we were prepping prior to our show is this reality that SEOs need to start thinking more creatively, that we need to be more on the creative frontier of where things are going. I have been saying for a long time that fundamentally AI is simply not going to replace the creativity space for humanity. It'll do a lot of other things. It might unblock us from certain places, but the genuine nature of creativity will still be one of the key defining features of humanity. And I want to know from you, like, what does out of the box creative SEO thinking and practices look like today?
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C
I think it looks like taking inspiration from other places that we might have been ignoring or like, you know, we were so stuck in, you know, checking boxes or making sure, okay, this is done, this is done, this process, next step, totally just changing the line of thinking with that. And in terms of content creation, you know, obviously there's sort of no barrier to entry there. You know, you have chat GP spin up an article, boom, done. And what's really important is just focusing on sharing things that are unique and valuable and putting that spin on it for the client. Obviously, you know, sharing something like specific data that only that client would have on. Maybe just say if we gave an example for like home services, it could be like, okay, we've dealt with this many homes in the year and these were like the most common problems based on our service area because of whatever weather problems we have. Like, let's just say it's roofing and they deal with hail or something like that. Like you can share those numbers, you're sharing value. It's not just something, you know, cut and dry where it's like, here's our blog process. This is exactly what we do here for all of our home services clients. This is the informational content we put out there. So that way we just say we have it. Boom. Topical relevance, done. You can share those specific insights that the client have. And it's like really important to focus on the communication side as well. Because of that client relationship, you're able to get so much more out of them. So you can make the content more creative and you can sort of get the buy in to do things that are more out of the box and different. And I know, I'm sorry, like that weren't like there wasn't a ton of examples on exactly what out of the box is, but I think you can't Even get there if you don't have the clients buy in to do so.
- [25:06]
B
Yeah, I mean, one of the things based on like the data conversation we were having earlier is like, I think a lot of SEOs go back and rely on their old school ways of thinking, right? Like, oh, I used to track keywords for rankings. Oh, I must track prompts for visibility. Like, that's a very, like, it's just this kind of like old school way of thinking where whereas you came into this conversation entirely different perspective on what users are doing in social to help us better understand how to perform content strategy, deploy better SEO tactics to reach the audience we want to reach. That's a totally creative, outside of the box way of thinking when it comes to what we're going to do as an industry. When you take those things into consideration, what are some of the things that you're doing when it comes to communication? To land the plane on some of these experiments, custom workflows, new data sets that you're trying to position with, you know, your own coworkers, with clients. How are you approaching that and what communication are you using? Because it is unique and it isn't the way most people are going to be thinking.
- [26:17]
C
Yeah, I am pretty fortunate that at least on the co worker side of things, everyone's sort of like, okay, go ahead, Celeste, you know, you do what you have to do. And clients are obviously a lot more different than that. And it does take building that relationship. Obviously if I have a brand new client, I don't unless they came into it ready, like they chose, you know, the agency. I got picked as the account manager because they wanted something different from whatever they've experienced with SEO agencies, it's going to be a little bit of a slow burn approach. And in getting their trust with sort of some tests that are a little more tried and true for clients where I could show them data and like, hey, we did this for another client. It's in your industry. This is what we were able to see. How do you feel about this? And it's sort of gauging their, you know, like a risk assessment per person, because everyone is completely different when it comes to risk and it really does just take time in building that relationship to getting them to eventually say yes, but if you just sort of lead them with the smaller tests and smaller wins there, you can eventually build them up to something a little more creative.
- [27:33]
B
Yep, love that. It's great advice and I think it's one of the things that we all need to start challenging ourselves on Is that outside of the box, creative thinking through communication and data that we have access to. One of the last things I want to talk about briefly is community. You've been building out the LA SEO community and I want to get your perspective on why that's important to you, what the value is for anyone who's listening in LA and wants to join up or be part of this. And where you think the future of local SEO and AI and marketing communities are going?
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C
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately what we see or what we have seen is just platforms rise and fall. You know, what used to exist like with our Twitter community, it's gone. Some people move to LinkedIn, some people move to blue sky, some people are just out of the loop, some tried to still stay on Twitter. And with everyone being so spread out now, the sense of community's kind of gone. The pandemic, you know, Covid killed a lot of in person groups. So, you know, when I first joined, I was fortunate enough that the Twitter community was active and live. And now since then, I mean, I was able to join the women in tech SEO community, which is absolutely fantastic at the amount of resources they have for people who are able to join the space. And then there's the SEO community by Noah Lerner, which is another great space for people who want to learn and connect. So I see there's a lot more small groups that are happening for just different groups of people based on whatever they have in common with each other, which is really great. I absolutely love this because I love talking to people. I like going to conferences. I understand conferences get really expensive and it's not something everyone can do or justify the budget for. And while I like speaking at conferences, I absolutely love talking to people and the networking, all those discussions and groups and dinners that happen outside of it even more. So I really wanted to a group like that in la and it was very unfortunate to find out that there wasn't anything like that at that point. There was the Southern California SEO meetup and they were pretty new and getting off the ground as well. So it was just something where I was like, okay, we could try to figure out something together. And it's already grown pretty nicely because I feel like people, especially with the rise of AI and kind of having that shoved down our throats on everything possible. We seek human interaction and I think local in person groups are only going to become bigger and you kind of see it already just outside of SEO, outside of marketing, lots of gen zers are turning to hobbies that are more in person and not so much on the phone. You have people doing book clubs now, run clubs. There's a huge need for that. And, you know, I'm happy to just be the person to set things up for people in la.
- [30:38]
B
Love it. All right, let's move to my favorite part of the podcast, which is where we go into our lightning round. I'm gonna ask you a few quick questions related to this week's topics, and you give me a quick 30 to 60 second response. You ready?
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C
Okay.
- [30:53]
B
All right. What's one data source? Most SEOs are still underusing TikTok data.
- [31:01]
C
A lot of SEOs don't even want to download the app, and there is so much to learn from there with others. Also search for the different categories, comments, reviews, all of it.
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B
Love it. Awesome. What's the scrappiest tool you've built and why did it make a difference?
- [31:19]
C
The Chrome extension had absolutely zero experience there, and it made a huge difference because it really boosted my confidence on the level of things that I could create from just prompting.
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B
All right, great. One behavioral metric you trust more than rankings.
- [31:41]
C
Session recordings. You get to actually see how the users are interacting with the page and if you know all the numbers of pages that they actually make it to, and if they end up filling out the form, whatever roadblocks they come up.
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B
Yeah, that's brilliant. What's the biggest mistake people make when they talk about sxo?
- [32:01]
C
It's just another acronym, just another fad. You don't need to, you know, say what you should have been doing this whole time with a whole new word.
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B
Right, right, right. And just. Just for our listeners, what are we really talking about when it comes to search experience optimization?
- [32:18]
C
Combining user experience, putting them at the forefront of it, and not just looking at search engines as your only source of data.
- [32:26]
B
Nailed it. All right. What makes an SEO community worth showing up for?
- [32:32]
C
I think even if there's one person who wants to show up, it's worth showing up for at that point because you have someone else there who wants to chat and who wants that community. I don't think it's the number of people, but just the fact that anyone is willing to show up at that point.
- [32:48]
B
Okay, and that wraps up this episode of the Voice to Search podcast. A huge thank you to Celeste Gonzalez from Rickety Roo from joining us. If you'd like to contact Celeste, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on voicesofsearch.com you can also visit her own personal website, celesteseo.com or her company website, ricketyroo.com if you haven't subscribed yet or want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be in your feed every week. Okay, that's all for today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.