Search Experience Optimization (SXO): Collaborator Podcast With Georgia Tan

Oleksandra Khilova [OK]: Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Collaborator podcast, where we chat with brilliant SEOs in our industry and share their knowledge with the world. Today's guest is Georgia Tan, co-founder of Switch Key Digital in Australia and a prominent international SEO speaker. Georgia focuses on helping businesses not only increase their online visibility but also create a seamless customer journey. Today’s topic is Search Experience Optimization (SXO), a strategy that combines SEO, user experience, and conversion rate optimization. Georgia will explain how to go beyond rankings and deliver a personalized experience. Right, Georgia?

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Georgia Tan [GT]: That's right. Yes. And it's great to be here. Thank you so much for getting me on your podcast.

[OK]: Coming up next. So, tell us a little bit about yourself — how you started your shared journey and why Search Experience Optimization is so important today.

[GT]: Yeah, for sure. And I think, like a lot of SEOs out there, they often say they never really intended to get into SEO and kind of fell into it. That was the same for me. I started off on the content writing side and, you know, initially wanted to go into journalism, but I ended up moving into the online content writing space. That's where I first learned about SEO in the publishing industry, and I really fell in love with the data and strategy side of it.

From there, I worked at several agencies, eventually reaching the SEO director level. At that point, I realized I wanted to take my own spin on it, which led to the concept of Search Experience Optimization that my agency offers. My co-founder, who is the head of design and a UX designer, and I focus on providing SEO that not only drives traffic and rankings but also considers what happens once users are on your website. We look at user engagement and experience, which are crucial for eventually converting visitors through CRO tactics and for building customer loyalty and trust.

[OK]: How do you feel the recent core updates have affected the industry in general?

[GT]: Yeah, there have been some huge changes, and I definitely feel like now, more than ever, we as SEOs need to evolve from many of the traditional tactics we used to rely on. SEO is evolving to become a broader part of brand strategy and digital strategy, diversifying across channels. For example, the recent news about Google being found to be a monopoly in the US and potentially losing some of its power — we don’t know how that's going to play out.

Essentially, SEO is no longer just about optimizing for Google. It’s also about optimizing for generative search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, as well as other channels like YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest, where visual content plays a big role. There are so many avenues that still fall under SEO, but in a much broader scope because consumers now want content in a variety of formats and preferences.

[OK]: What are the main differences between traditional SEO and Search Experience Optimization best practices? How can we define them, especially for those who have never heard of this term before? 

[GT]: SEO is still incredibly important, and it remains core. I think the focus in SEO is shifting towards a more user-focused approach. For example, when doing initial keyword research in traditional SEO, you might only consider and focus on search data. But in Search Experience Optimization (SXO), which many people may already be practicing without realizing it, you're also looking at broader customer data — like insights from your company, conversations with your support team, help tickets, or even user interviews with actual customers. These methods provide deeper insights into customer pain points, challenges, what they love, and why they’ve chosen your product or service.

One example is expanding keyword research to integrate user research, making it a broader process. Another example is building SXO user personas that incorporate search data while also using user experience design principles to identify your users. This includes understanding their preferences, consumption habits, demographics, motivations, and more.

From there, you can build a detailed customer journey map for each persona. At the start, they may not even know what problem they’re facing, but you're able to map out how their journey begins, even before they make a search. It’s crucial to incorporate search information into how people search throughout the discovery, comparison, and mid-funnel stages and, ultimately when they choose a brand.

It’s equally important to consider how that potential customer is feeling at each stage. Are they overwhelmed? Are they anxious? What are their main pain points and challenges?

[OK]: I would like to ask you a question about creating customer personas, because I think for many SEOs, this is a new chapter. To be honest, many SEOs mainly focus on keyword research and analyzing top-performing pages or domains in the SERPs. But how can we, as SEOs, create customer personas? What steps should we implement to do it the right way and improve our search experience?

[GT]: An example here might be from user design, where a user persona could look like this. However, the difference lies in some of the key questions as well. I think one really important thing when creating personas is that it’s quite easy to assume you know who your persona is or to think you understand their main personality or behaviors. The best way to avoid this is by actually interviewing a good sample of at least five, ten, or twenty people so your insights are validated and not just based on assumptions.

Key things to focus on include understanding their personal motivations and goals — what they are struggling with and what their aspirations are. Once you understand that, ask how your specific product or service solves their problem, or identify the areas they still feel are lacking. It's really helpful to be as detailed as possible.

For example, you could give the persona a full name, describe their situation, and include a key quote. You could even find AI-generated photos of people to choose one that represents the persona after interviewing multiple individuals. This helps you, as a marketer, to empathize when developing your strategy later on — especially in content strategy. You can think, "What would Edward B. want in this discovery phase?" and refer back to the persona.

[OK]: So, it's no longer enough to just collect keywords from the SERPs and suggestions. We need to dig much deeper to fully understand the customer's problem and provide a solution through our user journey. Right?

[GT]: 100%. And I definitely see that the way we do keyword research is shifting from being keyword-focused to becoming more funnel- and intent-driven. As we search more through Google and other platforms, and with the way people type their queries, I think we’ll see a lot more long-tail keywords. This means it won’t necessarily be the exact same keywords every time — you might suddenly get all kinds of very detailed questions. So, by pinpointing what they are truly asking, even if it’s phrased slightly differently, and understanding all the types of questions your target audience wants answered, SEOs can really nail this.

[OK]: Sometimes, we can even discover zero-volume keywords, which can also benefit our strategy.

[GT]: 100%. I would definitely say don't be afraid of using zero search volume keywords because maybe the SEO tool hasn't picked up on them yet. I've seen this happen a lot. But if your conversations with the target audience show that it's something they already know about and are thinking about, then it's worth including in your strategy.

[OK]: Yeah, I think it's also a good strategy, especially when you're in the early stages of developing a new website. From scratch, you can check all these points and implement them into your design and layout. I believe it will be much cheaper than developing a website without this consideration. Because once you've already designed, developed, and deployed a website, and then you start trying to improve the search experience, it will likely take much more time, money, and development effort. So, I think this is a crucial part of the development stage.

What about your experience? Have you ever had a client with a really outdated and poorly designed website that you tried to redesign? In my experience, it’s always a huge undertaking. So the question is, how can we implement best practices on a live site with a tight budget? How can we make improvements to a website when there isn't much development time, the budget is small, or the platform itself is very difficult to work with?

[GT]: I guess, to answer the first part: Yes, I’ve definitely seen and worked with a lot of clients who were dealing with a legacy CMS and needed both a migration and a redesign. Often, there aren’t enough resources, time, or budget to do everything. In that case, especially when working with larger companies and many stakeholders, I like to refer to the ICE framework. Even if we, as SEOs, can see many different things that need fixing, we have to prioritize.

The ICE framework is a useful way to score all the different issues and recommendations, considering the impact, effort, and difficulty. As you mentioned, with limited resources, it’s important to focus on the main business goals. For example, if the goal is conversions, it would be smart to start with high-traffic pages, where even a small improvement in the conversion rate could have a significant impact on how many leads you can generate.

[GT]: Yeah, on this slide here, you can definitely see how UX design can impact SEO, especially when it comes to things like information architecture and making content easy to find. Site structure is crucial not only for SEO and optimizing for Googlebot but also for helping users navigate and find the right information easily.

It's also super important to consider content and visual hierarchy. You need to ensure that what stands out visually is what is most important. This is similar to how we use H1, H2, and H3 tags in terms of text size, bolding, and colors. What’s above the fold and prioritized should be clear.

This concept is critical not just for websites but for all marketing channels — whether it’s on your website, social media, or EDMs (email direct marketing). Consistent branding across these platforms is incredibly important and will make a big difference.

[OK]: Yeah, sometimes in B2B niches, mobile isn’t a priority because many customers and decision-makers are searching from the desktop. There are even well-known websites in the SEO industry with poor mobile design, and it’s fine because their goal is to reach customers via desktop. So, just make sure to check your data before implementing mobile designs.

Also, I just want to add something about fonts. You mentioned fonts, and I totally agree with you. Sometimes, even changing the fonts can improve the conversion rate on a website. If you're on a tight budget and want to make improvements, running small A/B tests can be very effective. For example, you can experiment with changing fonts, altering the colors of key blocks, or slightly adjusting the layout by adding new elements. You don't need to overhaul the entire design to see positive results. However, you will need time for these A/B tests to show results.

By the way, what are your best recommendations for running A/B tests correctly? How much time do we need to measure the results, and how should we divide our target audience? What are the best practices for this?

[GT]: I think the hardest part since there are so many different tests you can run, is selecting the most important or priority areas to test. That’s where CRO can be leveraged alongside our SEO insights to ensure we are picking the best pages — like those with the most traffic or where we've seen significant drops in conversion rates or rates that are much lower than expected.

Another point regarding A/B testing is the time commitment. I think it’s also okay to acknowledge that if you’re on a really tight budget and you know something is likely to improve the results, but you don’t have the resources for full testing, you can make the change, assess the impact, and continuously improve. You can always revert if necessary. That’s more of a caveat, though.

As for the length of time needed for A/B testing, I’d say ideally, you should test for at least 1 to 3 months, as there are always fluctuations. Also, it’s important to keep as many factors constant as possible. For example, if you're testing a change in the featured image above the fold on a page, don’t simultaneously increase link-building activity, as that could skew the results.

[OK]: Yeah, and we also probably need to consider the seasonality of our website and traffic. I think it's not the best practice to run A/B tests during peak sales seasons, for example, as it could be harmful to your website’s performance.

Okay, A/B testing is clear for now. Now, let's talk a little bit about how we can implement our content strategy when we're ready with the user persona and know exactly who our ideal customer is. How do we get started?

[GT]: Yeah. So, when it comes to tying that into your content strategy, I would still recommend creating a content strategy where you have your topics and clusters or hub and spokes, depending on what people prefer to call it. I think it’s important to limit the number of personas to 1 to 3 so it's not too overwhelming. Each persona can have their own topic pillar within the overall plan.

This way, whether you're publishing weekly or monthly, you're addressing key points that each persona cares about without neglecting one or focusing too much on a particular area just because it's trending or there’s a bias toward certain interests.

[OK]: I would like to ask how we can measure, in general, each part of our implementation. When we talk about Search Experience Optimization (SXO), it's not just about content creation — we also focus a lot on design. So, what would you recommend to people? How can we plan this process as SEOs to succeed? For me, the development part is a huge undertaking and content creation is equally demanding. Each of these departments — especially development and design — has its own workflow. So, how can we integrate this into our daily routine effectively?

[GT]: Measurement is such a huge area, especially when it involves interdisciplinary collaboration between the SEO team, the content team, and the development team. What I’m working on now is creating an SEO scorecard. It's similar to how we use "share of voice" in SEO — a singular metric that is reflective enough to show your clients or internal stakeholders your overall performance in the market.

I would suggest having a "North Star" metric, which would be a weighted combination of scores from different areas: your organic traffic, engagement, user experience, and conversions as a top-level metric. This makes it easier to see overall progress at a glance.

Within each section, you would choose relevant metrics based on your business needs. For SEO, you can measure organic traffic and clicks to the site. For UX, you could look at the time on the page and bounce rate, for example. In the CRO section, you might track the conversion rate or average order value.

Since there are so many things you can measure, it can be overwhelming. That's why it's important to create a scorecard that gives a top-line view while still allowing for more granular reporting for stakeholders who may care more about certain aspects than others.

[OK]: Yeah, and sometimes, especially with freelance SEOs or SEO consultants, not all businesses are comfortable sharing sensitive data about conversions. How can we build trust between the business and SEO teams to show them that we genuinely need this data? What recommendations can you give to those who are struggling with this issue?

[GT]: I think the main thing is being able to tie everything back to the client's end goals or the overall business objectives. If, at the end of the day, the client wants to use the SEO channel to see more conversions, leads, or subscriptions, we can't accurately report on progress without that key information. Otherwise, we’ll have to rely solely on the data we do have access to, like traffic and rankings.

It’s really about aligning on the metrics they care about and ensuring we have access to the same information. That way, we can share the same goals as the client and work toward them together.

[OK]: Okay, I’d like to ask you how SEOs can collaborate with the design team. For us, sometimes it’s not so obvious because we tend to think in terms of patterns, user intent, and key pain points that we want to address in our articles. But we often don’t know much about the best practices for user experience aside from the general logic of how it should work.

The second issue is that UX designers may not always be familiar with SEO best practices. How can we build a bridge between the design and SEO departments and create a strong connection?

[GT]: You’ve already touched on one of the most important points, which is the need to share best practices with each other. When teams are willing to learn and have the shared goal of providing a great user experience that also converts, they become more open to understanding how to improve each aspect to achieve the same goal.

What I’ve seen work really well is the realization that, even though the roles can feel very separate, we are still part of the same team. This could be a multifunctional team focused on achieving business goals. That means educating each other — SEOs can share best practices that the UX team should consider when they are redesigning or creating new templates. On the other hand, UX designers can contribute by ensuring a balance between a great user experience and the SEO requirements, like having the right content, structure, and information on the page.

[OK]: Yeah, I think it’s hard to predict the knowledge base of UX designers or any department, but we can address this step by step during our collaboration and conversations between departments. This will help us discover what we may have missed or what we should highlight and remember for future success.

Now, about the content: how can we build our layout if, for example, we’ve created a layout according to the user persona and user journey, and it’s perfect for each block? What should we do next if we want to rework it, make it bigger, or expand it? It’s a common problem when the design and layout are very strict around text blocks, creating limitations. How can we deal with this? I mean, we can’t redesign it again since it’s already done and fixed. What should we do in these situations?

[GT]: Sounds like you're saying that in cases where the template is quite rigid.

[OK]: Yeah, exactly. When we have a very strict template, for example, a landing page with very limited access to the text editor, and we can’t make any edits at all, how can we change it? How can we adjust it in general?

[GT]: Yeah, of course, that would be pretty frustrating. In that case, we’d have to work with what we have, like adjusting the text placement, size, wording, calls to action, and titles — all of which are still important for conversions. If we're working with a very restricted template without room for more elaborate design, going back to basics with high-quality, unique images and expert content can still be effective. Even if it's just through text and simple images, it can still stand out and provide value to the user.

[OK]: Have you ever experienced a website migration or redesign where your Core Web Vitals decreased instead of improved?

[GT]: Yeah, I mean, some common issues with redesigns that can slow down a site are things like videos, animations, and carousels. So, I think it has to be a balance — adding those fun and engaging elements, but maybe not too many on important pages, or only if we know through testing that they will have a positive impact. It could also be simple technical issues that need fixing, like not setting the explicit width and height for new images or forgetting to compress them. All of these things can still be resolved.

[OK]: Yeah, in these cases, we just look at the test domains and carefully check if everything is fine before deploying the new design. Now, maybe you can share a few inspirational stories from your own experience. You don’t need to mention names — just examples of what you did and how it impacted your clients overall.

For example, I have a funny story where I simply changed the fonts on my website and ran an A/B test. As a result, our conversion rate increased by 33%. It wasn’t obvious to me at first how important fonts were for conversion rates, but that experience made me realize that sometimes it’s not about reworking keyword research a hundred times — it’s about improving the layout and making it more appealing. I think stories like this can inspire others to pay attention to these details.

[GT]: What I tested was clients who used illustrations of themselves, but since they were already quite authoritative in their space, we decided to change the images to their actual photos. This change significantly boosted conversions — by about 10-15% as a benchmark.

[OK]: Okay, so you changed the illustrations to real photos of real people, right? Yeah, yeah. How did you do it? A lot of business owners are hesitant to share photos of their team. How did you find the right words to convince them?

[GT]: It’s great when you can point out that their competitors are already doing something similar, especially if they’re in an expert-driven space. You can reference how competitors are prominently using real photos rather than illustrations or animations and how that seems to work well for them. It’s a great way to broach the subject and suggest starting with a test.

[OK]: Have you ever worked with or had experience with a website that has many local versions? I mean, how can we focus on Search Experience Optimization (SXO) for websites with multi-region, multi-language folders and different target audiences? For example, if our customer base is diverse, creating just three customer personas isn’t enough. We need to expand it and create at least three customer personas for each location.

[GT]: Yeah, it's super resource-intensive, but I definitely agree. Even if it’s one site, when you're dealing with so many different markets — where regulations are different, the products might not be exactly the same, and the target audiences have distinct preferences — there’s unfortunately no shortcut. I think you really need to understand each market and work with local experts, as they will have the cultural and geographical niche knowledge.

[OK]: I think we’ve covered all the most important topics. I’d like to ask you to highlight the main key takeaways about SXO.

[GT]: So, yes, I guess the key takeaways on SXO go back to the fundamentals. It's super important to know your audience and not just rely on search data but also to understand insights from user research and market data. Really focus on user intent and think about the full funnel. Also, don’t forget to diversify and consider the formats and channels your audience is using, and make sure you're present on those platforms.

[OK]: Yeah, and make sure to subscribe to Georgia's accounts to follow more useful tips about Search Experience Optimization (SXO), SEO, and the latest trends. Please subscribe to our channel as well; we really appreciate it! Let us know your thoughts about this episode in the comments. Thank you, and see you in the next episode. Bye!