Georgia Tan
Appearances
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Yeah, I mean, I can't believe we're going to Feb already, but I think, yeah, especially with, I guess, the news recently, for example, like with HubSpot and what's going on with their own content strategy, I think now is a great time to, like, have a fresh pair of eyes to look at what's already on the website and check that it aligns with the target personas and the business goals this year.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Exactly. I think it's, yeah, not, I guess only straying as far as, you know, it's going to be relevant for your niche and also focus on things that are going to convert your business at the end of the day.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Yeah, for sure, Nathan. So one example, we recently worked with a company in the home services industry that's really seen a huge improvement through SXO. So they initially came to us. wanting to focus on increasing the traffic, which we did, say by about 300%. But, you know, that doesn't really say a lot alone. And from my perspective, the real impact was actually optimizing for the conversions.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
So for this, you know, medium-sized business, they used to be getting from organic conversions of, you know, know say one a week only it's about getting to five to ten per day so as a percentage would say that's about the 80 to 150 increase in conversion rate and that really shows like the multiplier effect that you can have by aligning seo with that cro strategy um
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
And then eventually moved fully into SEO, eventually becoming an SEO director and often collaborating with in-house teams. And I think this is where I really realized that true success for your digital strategy really requires a more holistic approach. And I realized that something was often missing with how people approached SEO, focusing on the user.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
And that really has led to a great boost to your bottom line. And while I'm talking about conversions here, I'm really also talking about like brand trust and loyalty because these conversions, they didn't happen just by chance. They were focused on creating a better user experience.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
When they came to us, we were really lucky to work not just on the SEO and content strategy, but simultaneously working on improving their website design, the navigation, actually fixing issues with their form submission and booking process, and just making it easier for potential customers to understand who they were as a brand and what they were offering.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
So it's really the improved experience overall, I think, that... has led to more trust and like positive brand perception. So really having that positive experience over time will also mean, you know, more repeat customers, referrals. And so, yeah, I think we're not just measuring impact and conversions. The underlying driver has been that better user experience here.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
For sure. And I think what's been crazy is really seeing that instead of how people talk about, I guess, making the incremental wins, I definitely say that If you start off and you make relatively major changes, if possible, both on the design and CRO side together with SEO all at once, Google extremely, definitely loves that, and so do users.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Yeah, I know that it's something that all brands are going to worry about a lot, you know, whether we're pacing as we should with SXO and it feels like such a new thing. But I'd say it's no different to how you would measure your digital marketing plans or your content strategy. So, for example...
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
you know, once you update a page, maybe the first thing you do notice would be, could be ranking improvement for say a smaller brand or for a big corporation, you might find that actually the rankings don't change much at all, but might slowly start to see CTR increase, time on page increase,
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
or potentially, for example, more in the engagement side of things, you really want people to click the, you know, schedule consult or make a demo booking. And you start to see more click starts on the button there. Then, you know, you're on the right track. So I think it would be,
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
yes, it's not going to be overnight, but you'd be surprised at how I think when you combine not just SEO optimization, but actually really caring about the UX and the design elements, thinking about the conversions as a whole mindset, we've seen like great results for clients within a couple of months. And then after that,
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Like we could rank websites, but were they truly serving the people who visited them? This question really became even more pressing. And I started working with my co-founder, Alex, a UX designer. We really saw this disconnect
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
It really is that cascading effect where then you see the results going with the leads coming through.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
That's a really good point, actually. I think super, super relevant, especially now. I think overall, like we would, I'd expect for most brands for organic search and traffic, that's just going to slowly go down over time. Not because demand is down, but just because people are absorbing their content. So many different places, they might be asking chat GPT instead.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
But yeah, so I'd say the worst case is you might see that organic traffic It may not be up, but yeah, what you're getting is a lot more qualified. The engagement's a lot higher and it converts better.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
But at the same time, you know, we've definitely seen that improving your content for the user and really like being more focused on the personas, addressing, you know, how your target personas are feeling, what they're worried about. that's because people are so much more engaged and that's a ranking factor. It's likely that it's still going to rank better anyway.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
So it's unlikely to happen, but either way, I think if you're focusing on the outcomes, it's yeah, it's great.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
in the industry and that's what inspired us to create switchkey digital and develop the sxo or search experience optimization framework trying to bridge that gap between search visibility and user satisfaction
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Yeah, I think we need to go back to basics and the user, essentially.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Thanks so much for having me, Nathan. Really enjoyed our chat today. Anyone wants to learn more about SXO, you can reach me on LinkedIn, Georgia Tan, regularly share insights on SXO marketing there, or you can check out our website, switchkeydigital.com. Yeah. Thanks so much.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Exactly. I'd say search experience optimization, SXO, is that intersection of SEO, UX, and CRO. Often, I think people think that SXO is only combining SEO and UX, but I think it's really important to also consider that it's including CRO because we're not just focusing, say, in SEO on ranking top of Google, but...
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
it's really important to consider what happens before the click as well as after the click, basically the entire user journey. And my inspiration for developing this approach really came from working on the ground with clients.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
And we saw that simply reporting on like keyword rankings, traffic, even just conversions alone, it wasn't really telling the whole story and what stakeholders, especially, um, like business and product teams, what they really cared about was being able to attribute that revenue or the conversion goals, the engagement coming from organic search and see the impact on the bottom line.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
And at the same time, I noticed a lot of overlap in the optimization work I was doing. So for example, I could be optimizing a landing page. And on that page, I wasn't just optimizing for SEO keywords. It's also really important that I would be incorporating CRO tactics and doing and refining the copywriting to encourage conversions.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Another great example I like to give is when you're researching keywords, you're actually really researching user behavior and the needs of your target audience, and it's became clear to me that these disciplines, SEO, UX, and CRO, were all interconnected and really contributing to the same goal, creating that valuable experience to drive results.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
So I see SXO as formalizing that connection, providing that framework for a more holistic and effective approach to search. You'll see another great metaphor here. is if you think about building a house. We see traditional SEO focused a lot or talking about the technical optimization, the keywords, and that's the foundation, but that's not the whole house.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
So I think SXO really builds on that foundation to incorporate user experience. and conversion rate optimization to create that complete experience to not only like, you know, attract people to come in to your house, but enjoy the experience and then want to stay and become loyal customers.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Completely agree about, yeah, the search landscape constantly evolving and that hasn't been any faster than what we've seen in the past year and 2025 being the year of agents and everything, even more so, I can imagine. And I agree that, you know, while rankings, that's still really important, but we see, yeah, user engagement, AI search,
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
And being across all and multi-platforms becoming so important for success for a lot of brands. And that's really why I think SXO is so crucial. We're focusing on that foundation of user centricity, which is really key to navigating these changes. And,
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Yeah, we see that SXO isn't tied to any specific algorithm or tactic because it's about understanding the user intent across different platforms and what I call modals or formats and creating that valuable experience wherever your target audience is. I really think that's what really drives organic traffic and that's what is going to build
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
a strong brand sustainably, because if you can consistently deliver that value, going to differentiate yourself and have that clear brand identity and show your USPs, I think that's super important. Being able to show your customers why they should choose you over other competitors. So to give more of an example,
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Thinking about SXO and how that directly addresses user engagement, prioritizing UX, we see that when users have a positive experience on your website, then they're more likely to stay longer, explore more pages, and convert. And we know that search engines are actively seeking these positive user signals to really rank the pages as well.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
And even with AI, we see the core principle really remains the same, providing that valuable content to answer user questions. And I see SXO helping businesses create that content that's going to be optimized for both search engines and for user needs, especially for Google, where we know that AI overviews still often rely heavily on traditional search rankings as a massive ranking factor.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
So overall, I think that SXO really helps businesses create that cohesive brand experience to attract and engage users and to actually help drive really engaged traffic across multiple sources. So essentially I'd say it's, you know, how we can think about future proofing your search strategy. Then, you know, whatever Google or open AI or maybe Google,
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
deep learning throws our way, we'll be ready for it then.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
I definitely agree. I think measuring is always such a complex and tricky area. And for SXO, I definitely think measurement is one of the most challenging but also rewarding parts. You can actually...
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
have that process down so what i usually refer to measuring sxo is what i call balanced scorecard approach where we can combine both yeah the quantitative and qualitative data to get that complete picture so you know we still track traditional seo metrics organic traffic and keyword rankings click-through rates these are like still really important indicators of visibility but i'd say these are just the starting point um
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
So then we also really include user engagement metrics for our client reporting, bounce rate, duration, pages per visit, scroll depth. These will really tell us how users are interacting with our website, what they engage with, where they're stumbling or how they're moving through the funnel. Then, of course... In that third part, conversion rates are, of course, really crucial.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
So it's really important to make sure you're tracking that last part through the journey, how visitors then take their desired actions, whether that's signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, downloading a downloadable resource. And also really want to emphasize that I think qualitative data is just as important as the hard numbers.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
So we've seen great results for clients who are willing to invest in gathering that first-party user feedback, which could be through a survey, could be through interviews with some customers or subject matter experts, could involve some usability testing, and then analyzing some of the customer support interactions. And in the case where it's difficult to get the first party data and
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
then also looking at social listening tools to gauge sentiment, how that changes over time can be really, really helpful. And the key here with SXO reporting, which we really emphasize for our clients, is more of the focus back on business outcomes, how we can basically attribute from your experience
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
from that search or from the first visit, how that can then lead to organically generated sales revenue and eventually customer lifetime value. It's a bit trickier and the return on investment.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Yeah, so in terms of the first step businesses should take, I think that really the biggest challenge for a lot of businesses, for a lot of marketers or SEOs is really that mindset shift, transitioning from thinking in traditional SEO to SXO.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
and thinking about not only placing the value, I guess, on the keywords, on rankings, on backlink growth, to really focusing on the user and also really caring about what kind of traffic and really qualifying that a bit more to people who are really interested in your offer. So generally, I'd say the first step would be to ask yourself, do you know who your target audience is?
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
What are their needs? What are their pain points? What are they actually searching for, looking to solve? And then how can I address that through my product or service and in the helpful content I'm going to create?
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
And then once you have got that down, then I think some actionable first steps would be thinking about how can you start some small-scale user research, like even just a few user interviews or a small survey, and looking at existing customer feedback, support tickets, social listening.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
And then what I really encourage SEOs to do is to, you know, when you're doing your initial SEO audit, like in a discovery phase with a new client or a new brand, like do your UX and CRO audit or review as well. When you're on the website and ask yourself, like, is this easy to navigate? Is the content clear and engaging for your target personas? Do you see any usability issues or blockers?
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Where are the stumbling blocks in that funnel? And that's where you can use tools like heat map, session recordings, and think really about how the UX and CRO elements work together. Like, for example, you might have copy on a page that works with search intent. and sounds great and check that it also encourages conversions, for example. And then my last point here would be,
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
Thanks, Nathan. My background is a blend of content and SEO. I started as a content writer and that really gave me a deep understanding of user needs and how to craft compelling narratives. And then I moved into content strategy and learned more about the impacts of content and aligning with business goals.
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Search Experience Optimization (SXO): The Future of SEO?
It's okay to start small and iterate. It's okay, you can't do everything at once, so you really have to prioritize, which is the hard part. Focus on a few key areas for improvement that are backed by both your quantitative and qualitative data, and then you can continue to iterate based on more feedback. I want to emphasize that, yeah, SXO is a continuous process, not a one-time thing.