International SEO Insights from China | Natalia Witczyk
Welcome back to The Search Session! I’m Gianluca Fiorelli, and in this episode I’m joined by Natalia Witczyk. She’s an International SEO Consultant who took on a bold new challenge by moving to China, diving into a completely different digital landscape while continuing her global SEO work.
In this episode, we explore:
Natalia’s experience bridging Chinese and Western SEO markets.
How Baidu’s black-hat culture influences SEO practices in China.
Why Chinese brands are expanding globally, while Western brands remain hesitant to enter China.
The impact of platforms like WeChat, which were already transforming search behavior even before AI.
The risks of Google’s AI translations bypassing local content and languages.
Why SEO strategies must shift toward UX personalization and human-focused metrics.
It’s an interesting chat with useful advice, clear insights on SEO and AI, stories from Natalia’s experience, and plenty of other topics along the way.
Video Chapters
Transcript
Gianluca Fiorelli: Hi, and welcome back to The Search Session. Today, we're going very far from our usual European and Western lands. We’re heading directly to the Far East, in China.
Our guest today is European—very much so!—but she decided to take on a bold adventure by moving to China to start working and collaborating with a local SEO and digital marketing agency, Jademond Digital.
This is going to be a fascinating conversation, because she’s like a reporter from another world. On the other hand, she’s also the founder and CEO of Mosquita Digital, and she continues to work with her own European clients as well.
Now, before this episode, I asked ChatGPT to give me a short, playful profile for her. It analyzed her LinkedIn and came up with this: “Global SEO Explorer, Digital Polyglot, Human-Centered Technologist.”
Yes, I know ChatGPT can hallucinate sometimes—but in this case, I think it got it spot on. Those are pretty great descriptions of our guest today.
So, let me introduce her—and Natalia, please forgive me in advance if I mispronounce your surname. Hi Natalia, how are you? Natalia Witczyk.
Natalia Witczyk: Very well done! Actually, that was a very good pronunciation.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Okay, perfect.
Natalia Witczyk: Thank you for the fantastic introduction—and thanks to GPT as well. I must be in its good books somewhere in the AI black box. I really liked that intro, thank you.
Bridging Western and Chinese SEO
Gianluca Fiorelli: I always ask this question to all my guests, and I think it’s especially fitting for you. You’re living with one foot in our Western world, through your work with Mosquita Digital, and the other in a completely different world—the Chinese digital landscape—through your collaboration with Jademond.
So, how are the SEOs treating you on both sides of the world?
Natalia Witczyk: Well, it’s true—I definitely have two feet in two different worlds!
But I have to say, my main role at Jademond in China is actually helping Chinese clients enter European and Western markets. So in that sense, I’m always working as a bridge between the two. I’m not just separating them. And because of that, my work ends up being quite similar on both sides. It’s really just the way I communicate about SEO that’s different.
As for my European clients—the ones I continue to work with—I’m kind of hoping they’ll eventually take an interest in entering the Chinese market. But so far... that hasn’t really happened.
Interestingly, there are currently more Chinese companies wanting to expand abroad than there are Western companies wanting to enter China. That’s due to political, economic, and other reasons we won’t get into here.
So yes, these are two very interesting worlds.
Chinese Brands Entering Western Markets: Key SEO Challenges
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, absolutely. And that brings me to something I find really fascinating. We all know the big Chinese brands—like Shein, Temu, and so on—because they’re basically invading our homes with their products and sales, not to mention our social media feeds with their ads and promos.
But when a Chinese brand wants to break into Western markets—say, through international SEO targeting Europe, the U.S., or other parts of the world—what are its main concerns?
Are they different from the concerns Western companies typically have when they start doing international SEO or expanding their global visibility?
Natalia Witczyk: The main concern is that the average Chinese client has very, very little understanding about Google SEO.
They might’ve heard bits and pieces here and there, but they’re very much focused on black hat tactics. That’s what they see as the foundation of any SEO activity.
So, trying to sell them on the idea of doing things in a more qualitative way—that we don’t want to just create hundreds of blog posts a month, and that the number of posts on a blog isn’t a KPI—can really boggle their minds.
It’s often because they’ve worked with Chinese agencies that claim to offer “Google SEO” services, but those agencies usually don’t have any actual experts who’ve lived or worked with Western agencies. When approaching them with concepts like quality content, human-written copy, and similar ideas, it doesn’t land well at first.
But that’s mainly because Baidu work is just so black-hat related, and so not SEO orientated that they just don’t understand that there can be such a different ecosystem out there. They’re constantly comparing Google to Baidu.
Baidu vs. Google: Why Baidu SEO is a Different Game
Gianluca Fiorelli: I see. So it’s kind of a two-way challenge, right? Flipping the perspective, it can also be quite difficult for us.
Now, I’m not saying black hat tactics don’t exist in Google or other search engines—and even in LLMs now, which are really easy to spam. But when it comes to educating marketers and other SEOs about the differences between how Google and Baidu operate, what are the other key differences SEOs should understand?
Apart from what you’ve already mentioned—like the almost 99% of black hat SEO tactics for ranking on Baidu. I think this is especially interesting now, as we’re moving into a broader mental framework where we can’t just think in terms of Google. We need to consider multiple possible surfaces.
So, let’s say Zara wants to target China and focus on Baidu. What should they be paying attention to?
Natalia Witczyk: Great question. I’d say the biggest difference isn’t just the black hat aspect— this is just one element. But Baidu has no real limits when it comes to pushing its own results or running ads.
With Google, we kind of have it good: a maximum of four ads at the top. That’s not too much compared to how Baidu can look like, which is often four ads at the top, plus more at the bottom—and even in the middle of the page. And in between, it’s filled with Baidu’s own products: Baidu Shopping, Baidu Wikipedia, and all sorts of other services they own.
They basically have an equivalent for everything Google offers—and probably even more digital products—and they shamelessly push them in the search results.
So I think one of the biggest realizations when doing SEO in China for Baidu is that the space you’re competing for is drastically smaller. You’re not even playing the same game anymore.
And on top of that, Baidu is completely China-centered. There’s no international ambition, no real infrastructure for anything outside the local market. It only supports simplified Chinese, not traditional. It supports one type of writing and one spoken language: Mandarin.
Cantonese isn’t supported, which means you have to completely drop the idea of international SEO when you’re working with Baidu. It becomes a different discipline entirely—Baidu SEO. And you’re only analyzing one country, one language.
English queries basically don’t exist on Baidu. I mean, sure—if you go to baidu.com and type something in English, you’ll get some results. But the engine just isn’t optimized for those kinds of queries, because they just don’t appear.
Foreigners living in China don’t really use Baidu. They always use Bing. And Chinese users simply don’t have the habit of searching in any language other than their own.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Interesting… really interesting, especially what you were saying about Baidu’s search features.
In fact, when I was preparing my very long article previewing how Google might integrate its search features—as in the SERPs—into the AI Mode, in order to make it the default surface for Google Search, I came across some sources suggesting that Google had actually been looking at how Baidu operates—possibly to better understand how to embed features in a more seamless way, and even more importantly, how to keep users inside the Google.
Do you think that kind of consideration is realistic? Since you probably have more regular or practical exposure to how Baidu is used—maybe more so than most people watching or listening to us—do you ever see something and think, “Ah, Google is starting to do something similar to what Baidu’s already been doing”?
Natalia Witczyk: That’s a great question, actually. It takes me back to the last time we met in person—at Google Search Central Live in Madrid.
Funny anecdote: I was there after the official event finished, and some Google engineers and Googlers had stayed behind to hang out. We just happened to be in a conversation, and—me being me—I couldn’t shut up and started talking to them about something they were probably not interested in at all.
But I was so excited to be there and to have that conversation, I just started geeking out about other search engines beyond Google in the world. And I basically started to explain to them how Brave does this and how DuckDuckGo does that, how search features are different here and there.
And there were two people—I don’t want to say their names, because I’m not sure—but one person was from Search Console, and the other was from Search Quality. They looked at me like: “Brave? What's Brave?” “Yeah, DuckDuckGo—I heard about it once.”
And then they were like, “Baidu? Yeah, yeah, there's something in China.” They were just not interested at all.
And I think that’s when I realized—they don’t care about the competition. They mark the standard. Maybe, at some point, someone checked out another search engine just to see how it looks. But I don’t think that’s the direction they need to take. I think they just start with a blank page, and they draft over that. Then they add to it, and redesign it. They don’t need to look back at anyone else at all.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Cool. Interesting. Maybe it’s just... convergence—a natural convergence from two different, let’s say, points of view on what search, or the search experience, should be.
One went one way, the other a very different way. But ultimately, for business reasons, maybe Google and Baidu are starting to converge—and are, in a way, becoming the same.
Natalia Witczyk: A hundred percent, actually—to this I’d add, because I find what you just said super interesting.
Lessons from Social Media: Adapting to Google’s Zero-Click Future
Natalia Witczyk: I think we shouldn’t be surprised about Google giving us fewer and fewer clicks. Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have, for more than a decade, been actively changing their algorithms to keep people on the platform.
And for example, Meta’s KPI is time spent on the platform—not the number of users, not new registrations—but actually measuring usage in minutes per day, on average.
So why wouldn’t Google do the same? It’s obviously a different product, but the KPI is pretty much the same: just have people use your product instead of sending them away.
So yeah, I would definitely say it’s probably the result of a wider trend than just search trend.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah, yes. I remember—it was 11 years ago when our friends in social media went through what we called the reach apocalypse.
Back then, organic reach was the most important thing for them. And then, from one day to the next, the organic reach of posts collapsed—basically to zero.
And yeah, in fact, this is something I sometimes—not so ironically and not exactly as a joke—suggest to our SEO friends: we should ask them what they did 11 years ago because social media marketing didn’t die.
Yes, there's a lot of paid involved now, but it’s not only about paid social. It’s not the only thing they do. Organic still exists—but it’s a different kind of organic.
That’s similar to what we’re trying to explain, like Rand Fishkin does, for instance—that you should treat Google as a window for zero-click marketing, where the goal is to be visible, consistently present, and truly remarkable, etc. Which is somehow what people are doing on the social media timeline.
Natalia Witczyk: One hundred percent.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Social media indeed has the advantage that people can interact and engage with a post organically, even if it's not that visible in the stream.
AI’s Impact on Search Behavior: What China’s Already Doing
Gianluca Fiorelli: Now, talking about evolution—obviously, AI is the biggest one right now.
I want to keep this comparison going between the Chinese world and the Western world. Maybe also—though I’m not sure if you’ve had a similar experience—you could touch on countries near China, like South Korea or Japan. But let’s focus on China first.
What do you see in terms of search behavior? We know AI is strongly backed by China—not just as a marketing trend, but as a strategic, political asset. So how do you see AI being used in search over there?
And do you see anything that’s similar to how AI is being used in search in the West?
Natalia Witczyk: Yes—I think we have to start from a very top-level perspective.
The main difference between the Chinese world and the West, as we know it—and specifically the user experience—is that classic search has already been declining in China for quite some time, even before the AI revolution was ever heard of or imagined.
China’s unique ecosystem means that some companies don’t even invest in their own websites. Instead, they invest in a WeChat app—in what's called a “mini program.” So essentially, they’re part of the WeChat ecosystem.
And for those listeners who may not be familiar with WeChat—it’s the “equivalent” of WhatsApp. Actually, “equivalent” is an unflattering description. It’s like a precursor to WhatsApp—but with far more features integrated.
All local businesses have a WeChat account that they operate from, which often means they don’t need to invest in a website at all. You simply chat with the business to get things sorted—and then send a payment, because WeChat has its own built-in payment system.
Then there are mini apps, which aren’t so different from what we now call progressive web apps. But instead of being built with web technologies, they’re built using WeChat’s own technology.
And once you're logged into WeChat, you can access that entire system—you’re instantly verified, you receive notifications, and so on. That’s literally how I buy my morning coffee. That’s how I get my taxi service—the equivalent of Uber. That’s how I find maps.
And that’s how people share businesses with me. When I ask for an address, they don’t send the location—they send me a WeChat link with the map system integrated into it.
So, from that point, if we’re talking about the future of search and what we might learn from China—it’s important to realize that search is not the only way. AI is disrupting search as we know it, yes—but in China, it’s already been disrupted.
I think the user experience will just continue to fragment over time. We’ll have different tools and platforms tailored to different intents.
And potentially, the disruption from AI could mean that some social networks might try to position themselves as local business or recommendation platforms—almost as an alternative to traditional search or even AI interfaces—because they’re more user-centered and connection-driven.
But yes, I also think we might be witnessing the end of the era where a single platform dominates everything in the West.
Google’s monopoly is being challenged right now. And who knows who’s going to benefit from that? It might not be direct competitors—maybe not Bing just taking over market share—but other, different ways of interacting with businesses might start to appear.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, yes—I agree. I think we’re still in a transitional moment, a passage from one situation to another. It’s almost like a quantum situation—where one thing can be A and B at the same time.
So right now, we still have the classic Google search: snippets, links, but also the AI Overview, which is pushing them 2,000 pixels down the page. And it’s interesting, what you were saying—maybe this opens up space for an unseen front-runner that can be the social. Maybe that’s why Meta is really pushing its own AI, Llama, which is actually very good.
And now, for the last month or so, it’s also in WhatsApp—which, honestly, could be even more interesting than having AI features in Facebook or Instagram.
Maybe when I was earlier asking whether Google Search is looking at Baidu for inspiration, we should actually be asking: Is Facebook looking at WeChat for something? This could be the reality.
How European Clients are Adapting to AI in SEO
Gianluca Fiorelli: But let’s go back to Europe now—and to your Mosquita Digital clients. How are they experiencing all these changes, which have accelerated over the past 12 months on Google Search and the stronger emergence of LLMs? How are they living through it? And how are you trying to reassure them and guide them through all of these changes?
Natalia Witczyk: I’m actually quite lucky in the sense that my clients really value the interaction side of our collaboration.
I’m not the type of SEO who just sends monthly reports over email and delivers work through attachments. I like to have a call, go through things together, share my screen, and look at Search Console live while we discuss the traffic.
I’m not a “Here’s your dashboard” kind of consultant. I think they feel reassured because we’re having conversations, I’m not telling them or informing them on what’s happening—I’m asking what they want to know, what they already understand, and how these changes are being seen internally.
I’ve also had a great opportunity to speak with other stakeholders I wouldn’t normally be introduced to. In one case, I had a quick 30-minute chat with a company’s CEO—just to get them aligned with the idea that KPIs and metrics are changing. We can’t keep holding on to the same expectations as before; we need to adjust. And that’s a really important—and interesting—conversation to be had.
And I highly recommend this to anyone who’s working as an external consultant: get your face in front of the people who are making decisions. Have those conversations with them.
Because some of them are really unaware of what’s happening—and others are aware through social media, from people who are not you. People they follow, who are SEOs that you may not really share the same point of view with. Right? So you want to stay on top of that communication. That’s really my take on it.
As for how they’re living through these changes, I'm lucky to also work with many B2B businesses. For them, it’s not the same as with affiliates or B2C sites—you know, the kind that rely on informational content to attract traffic and then get a piece of the pie from that. I don’t deal with much of that, which means they are very much depending on themselves. And some of them are actually already seeing quite a bit of LLM traffic—which bodes very well.
They’ve been established brands, so it’s not something I can take credit for. It’s not a hack I’ve applied. It’s something they’ve progressively built over time—through their brand, recognition, niche, and the specific problem they solve.
Now, they’re simply reaping the benefits of a long-term communication strategy. And it’s not just PR or branding—it’s a real, consistent communication strategy they’ve been following. So, touch wood—so far, so good.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, touch wood. Your experience with B2B is something I’m seeing too. In my case, with a few clients, it's a long-term collaboration that’s been going on for years. So, somehow—without even realizing it, because we started well before LLMs became a thing—we were already working on the same foundations. That is to establish a central position for the brand—focused on your topics, your services. Be authoritative in that space. And don’t go chasing loosely related topics that are just lightly related to yours because it’s pointless.
You don’t want to be attracting traffic from, say, students who are just copy-pasting a question, landing on your page, grabbing a snippet of text, and then bouncing back to Google to search for the next test question.
That kind of behavior is awful—especially now, when you’re looking at Search Console data. If you're not aware of what’s behind it, you might misinterpret it. You might think, “Oh, this is a prompt,” when in fact it’s not a prompt, it’s a copy-paste question.
And yes, I saw that when done correctly, this kind of long-term strategy does start to pay off—sometimes immediately. Not just in terms of visibility, but even in things like the AI Overview. Even when it was still just SGE in experimental mode, we started seeing results.
But this shift in behavior—it’s not entirely new. I remember Rand Fishkin at The Inbounder, I think it was back in 2018, when he first started talking about the zero-click situation and how user behavior on Google was changing. That was quite a few years ago now, and since then, it’s only grown—year after year. Now, it’s more obvious than ever. Maybe not so much for B2B, but definitely for B2C and publishers—the metrics are changing.
SEO Metrics and Reporting in the Age of LLMs
Gianluca Fiorelli: So you mentioned earlier the need to change how to measure the impact of SEO strategies and tactics. How are you reframing those metrics now—to understand what’s actually working, and how to adjust your strategy and your tactics accordingly?
Natalia Witczyk: Obviously, for websites with direct sales functions within the website or very easily measured conversions, it’s much easier to showcase in the data analytics of choice—GA4 or different platforms. If you just see a constant influx, or even some people have seen increases since the huge AI changes, because there are so many qualified leads just coming to the websites now, it’s very easy to make a case that a drop in clicks is not an issue. Or even that it’s worked to our benefit if we see that increase.
It’s harder when we have a business that requires less direct contact at first with the brand, and potentially, measurement and attribution issues they’ve had before still haven’t been resolved. I don’t know if you find that with your clients, but with my clients, GA4 implementation has not gone as smoothly as it should have. Many of them are dealing with some crisis—whatever version of financial situation they’re in—that doesn’t allow them to invest across all channels. Sometimes that means they leave their GA4 high-level reporting at the very basic level because they don’t want to invest too much into something they don’t even like.
So I’m still seeing outcomes of that attribution situation right now. But it basically means that what I was preaching two years ago and one year ago—which was, “Search Console! Trust Search Console, that’s your tool”—I’ve had to change that slogan now. And I’m back to liking and getting friendly with GA4 again for that reason.
So yeah, custom reports in the Explore section with regex that matches the segment to be. All the LLMs you can think of, because the wider the report, the better. And then you just list them in the detailed list to see that traffic, and then essentially measure conversions where you can. That will be my two simplest answers to a very complex question.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, and often the main conversions have been micro-conversions, because sometimes businesses forget to tag them correctly. For example, in e-commerce, the main conversion is revenue, the basket, and what is sold. But then they forget to properly track things like newsletter subscriptions, or subscriptions to a loyalty program—things like that.
If you put all these kinds of micro-conversions and conversions, and if clients already have something like HubSpot or Salesforce, for instance, it will also be ideal to match this data with the CRM data. In order to make them see the effect post-traffic, post-landing, in the long wave of nurturing and client acquisition, and nurturing after acquisition.
Maybe as SEOs, it used to be easier because we had Search Console, and we had the old Google Analytics, Universal Analytics. Attribution and the contribution of organic search were really easy to understand. That’s why, to be honest, we ended up hating GA4 at first.
But now, we all know GA4, or at least have a good collaborator who is a GA4 specialist—not just for implementation, but also for reading the data and further asking the specialist to create Looker dashboards and things like this.
Natalia Witczyk: A hundred percent.
International SEO Challenges: Google’s AI and Translation Issues
Gianluca Fiorelli: Exactly. Regarding your specific topic of international SEO, I have a few questions. Doing international SEO myself, these things really concern me about how Google is evolving.
One thing is the dreaded, and also very polemic, fact that Google is substantially translating—using Google Translate, usually—English sources into AI Overviews in other languages. What’s your opinion about this? Not only from an ethical perspective, or whether this is something that should or shouldn’t be done, but also: what are the risks for a brand?
For instance, what happens when a brand’s English version is presented, translated into Spanish, in Google’s AI Overview, even though that brand already has an official Spanish version?
Natalia Witczyk: That’s a great topic to untangle a bit. It makes me really upset as an English non-native speaker who grew up in Poland and then spent the last years in Spain.
Because now, taking off the SEO hat and putting myself into the shoes of a future search user, it feels like our language—our way of thinking, our way of constructing phrases—will become even more Americanized than it already is. It’s already happening, obviously, because of globalization. But now, it feels like this will be another step in erasing a bit of our language identity as users.
We won’t even realize how quickly we’re picking up phrases that aren’t really native to our languages. They’ll just be copied versions, translated. So that worries me.
I don’t know the statistics for Google, and I don’t think Google has ever shared that data. But I do know the statistics for ChatGPT. ChatGPT has been trained on 92% English-speaking content across its whole operation. That alone shows how disproportionate the English impact is on AI training models.
Obviously, there’s also a disproportion in the amount of accessible content in a given language. English is not the first language for the majority of people on Earth—it’s a second language for most, not the first. So it’s very interesting that it has now become a kind of lingua franca in a way we probably never saw coming. And I don’t think that’s going to go away.
Now, taking it back to a professional SEO opinion—I think Google has to sort this out in some way or another, because the quality of results is being impacted. And I don’t think hreflang is a solution that helps AI at all. It didn’t fully work for Search. Google has acknowledged many times that it’s not perfect—it’s just the best they could do with the challenges they were encountering.
I think it would be really interesting if, maybe, AI tools used the HTML lang tag instead of hreflang to distinguish languages more precisely. Maybe new tags will appear to actually categorize content by dialect and locality of a specific language. There’s probably a lot of training that needs to be done to fix this issue, but I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon.
We’re already in a situation where the training data goes so far back—before we even knew these tools would be released. I mean, for those of us who didn’t work within those projects, right? So the bias is already implanted into the functionality of these tools.
Now, I’ve opened a lot of topics and possible points here, so feel free to guide me towards an answer or a topic you actually want me to focus on.
Gianluca Fiorelli: No, no, I think you’ve opened—as we say here in Spain—you’ve opened a melón.
Natalia Witczyk: Many melons.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. And I think, confronting your ideas and what you said, somehow, this is inevitable. Because if we think back to MUM, from the very beginning of its announcement in 2020—or 2021, I don’t remember—it was already defined as multilingual.
It was able to move from one language to another without any issue, and without necessarily passing through English. But, obviously, Google’s index and content on the web is mostly in English.
I remember Gary Illyes from Google, when talking about spam and quality, said that in certain countries, they cannot go too hard with spam policies. Because if they apply the same strict filters as they do in the United States, there would be nothing left to show. Because there is obviously less content produced in many languages.
So, I think this issue is now embedded in how Google is working, technically speaking. Yes, hreflang never really worked. When it does work better, it’s often because people are using tricks that actually go against the guidelines—like not using the canonical tag in combination with hreflang, even though Google sometimes suggests doing so.
But for me, the biggest problem—and this is something where brands and marketers, not just SEOs, should be very vocal—is that if you want to offer a good user experience, you can’t present source content that isn’t the default for the audience you’re translating it to.
We know that people usually don’t click on the source links in AI Overviews. But when they do click on those pages, the impact can be totally negative. They expect to land on a page in their own language, but they end up on an English page. Even worse, that page might be offering products or services that aren’t even available in their country.
That’s a terrible UX—from search to website—and it could also create a negative impact for the cited sources linked in AI Overviews.
Natalia's Prediction: The Shift from 'International SEO' to 'International UX'
Natalia Witczyk: So, I think—now I’m going to make a wild prediction that might never go anywhere. But if I make it first, remember this conversation—I was the first one to say it.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Totally.
Natalia Witczyk: Who knows if we’ll start seeing, instead of just international SEO as a specialty, we might have International UX as a new branch of UX design. And instead of relying on international URL setups, hreflang, internal linking, and all the things SEOs traditionally do when specializing in international SEO, maybe we’ll move towards International UX Personalization.
Maybe the era of having unique URLs per language and country version is over. Because if AI is training, translating, and working multimodally, perhaps you’ll be serving things like the currency or specific localized elements as part of the UX design—not as part of the web experience design as we’ve done it until now.
Maybe there will be a new pathway for how to program websites—hopefully without JavaScript—to actually deliver those local variants in the source code. That way, AI could understand which version is for Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Spain, and all the other countries that share the same language. And from there, it could adjust the experience for the user without needing separate URLs. Who knows? What do you think?
Gianluca Fiorelli: I think that’s not a crazy hypothesis. And I’m going to back it up with things that Google is already doing.
We know that Google is slowly migrating all territorial domains to Google.com. For instance, in Spain, google.es doesn’t exist anymore—it redirects to google.com. But, for example, google.co.uk still exists, and you can still go there.
However, what’s being shown to you is becoming more complicated. It’s getting harder to actually see what you want to see. For SEO analysis, especially international SEO, it’s becoming really difficult because Google is adapting the UX dynamically.
It looks at your browser settings, uses cookies, and checks your Google Search setup—like if you’re searching from Spain and Spanish is set as your main language. All of this is embedded from the moment you set Google as your default search engine.
So, this technique of UX adaptation could be something that websites will use in the future, too, by leveraging cookie-based setups. And also, if you remember, Natalia, Google has decided not to switch off third-party cookies.
You remember when they were saying, “We’re not going to use cookies anymore”. And then, what was it—five, six months ago? They said, “No, no, we are still looking at cookies.”
I think it’s not just because it’s a mess without cookies, but maybe also because of this situation we’re discussing. So, a brand with its website, in the future, might say, “Okay, if everything is going to be Google.com, if everything is going to be ChatGPT.com, and these chat LLMs that don’t even think in terms of multi-country—they’re eventually multilingual, but multi-country never—we need a new approach."
You have to explicitly specify the country you are in to get results that are consistent with your geolocation. But in the case of Google, it doesn’t work like that. As I was saying, country geotargeting is done because it localizes you through Chrome, through your device, and it gives you results based on what you’ve set up in your Google Search settings.
So maybe a brand could eventually do this kind of optimization using cookies, in terms of UX and the version of the website that’s presented to the user. It’s similar to when we visit Amazon for a second time, and Amazon shows us what we bought or searched for 30 days earlier. Something like this could eventually be part of the future.
Because yes, in a way, what you're suggesting is using the same technique that Google already uses.
I think it’s also important to still give users the option to switch to another version if they want to. For example, in September, I’m going to speak at Digital Olympus in Amsterdam, but maybe I want to see things as if I were in Spain when I land on a website. So, following good UX practices will still be necessary. So yes, I think your idea is not so crazy.
Natalia Witczyk: But this is the thing—when we started in SEO, at least I did, I was preaching to clients and educating them again and again that dynamically changing the language without changing the URL is the worst thing you can do. Because you’d end up with all these translations that Google couldn’t read properly.
And now, we might be rolling back that idea and going in almost the opposite direction. So, that would be a very interesting shift.
But I want to say one thing that’s really important—a good parallel with what Google just did with the migration to Google.com. Google does not have to position itself in Google. So, if you’re listening and you’re a brand owner thinking, “Oh, this sounds like a great idea, let’s do it”—don’t. Don’t do it yet. It’s not the time.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Don’t do it yet—or, I always remember this case that I discovered thanks to our common friend, Aleyda Solis.
If you really want to do it, I think... I can’t remember the name of the website right now, I have a blank state of mind. But I remember there was a website where, independently of the country you were searching from or the version you wanted to see, the on-page URL was always the same. The page would load in Spanish for Spain, Thai for Thailand, English for the US, and so on—but the URL itself would not change.
However, they had a good trick. They kept the on-page URL clean, always the same domain name, but in the hreflang and everything else, they told Google that the on-page for the Spanish version was, for example, domain/es/es, and so on for other languages. That’s why they were able to do that while still maintaining the right international SEO signals. But it’s just a trick—it’s only for the on-page URL appearance.
So yes, I totally agree with you. Maybe we are heading towards that future we’ve just described, but it’s not here yet. You can start thinking about it, but please, remember the reality of where we are now.
Natalia Witczyk: Well, if you’re a UX researcher interested in international elements—understanding how different languages and alphabets—that could be your next big idea. How to design a smooth user journey between countries and markets that actually makes sense. So, who knows?
Insights from Being a Search Awards Judge: How Global SEO Strategies Are Evolving
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, I want to completely change the topic of our conversation. You, like me, are a judge for many Search Awards. I want to ask you for a sort of retrospective. From when you first started to be a judge up to this last year, what changes have you noticed?
Using the award entries as a mirror for how SEO, content marketing, or performance marketing is evolving? What kind of evolution have you observed in these entries over the years? Because I think this can be a good barometer for where people are going.
Natalia Witczyk: Oh, that’s a great question. I think when I first joined the awards, that was already three or four years ago. So, my point of comparison isn’t as extensive as some of the really established judges who’ve been doing this for decades and even helped set up the whole system.
But here is my perspective for the last four years: in the first year, automation really stood out—certain automations and programmatic SEO approaches had this “wow” effect. Then, a year and two later, those same tactics became completely normalized.
What I’m seeing now is a shift where automation, programmatic, and scaling strategies are still there, but they’re being balanced with a human touch at key points in the process. Whether it’s designing prompts, quality control, or mixing automated and manual approaches. That’s now the gist.
So, we’re moving from a phase of chasing pure scalability into a phase where people are asking, “Where does scalability actually make sense and where doesn’t it make as much sense anymore because there’s a better approach?” And I think that’s really interesting—how some trends evolve, refine themselves, and then suddenly take a new direction.
But what’s even more fascinating is how, especially in the European Search Awards and Global Search Awards, you can see the disparity in how different markets and cultural concepts respond to the same realities.
In some big-budget campaigns—let’s say in the UK or Ireland, where they usually tend to spend more, or in the US—you’ll see large-scale automation with custom-made tools.
Meanwhile, in entries from Eastern Europe or some Asian countries, teams are working with completely different budgets and challenges. They often use freely available tools or lower-cost subscription platforms and find clever ways to adapt them to their needs. And yet, they still achieve fantastic results on a real budget.
That contrast has been one of the biggest learnings in the short tenure of my judging experience. How about you?
Gianluca Fiorelli: No, no, I’ve seen something very similar. And I think that what you said about programmatic and stepping back a little from pushing too much is also because Google really hit hard everything that can be considered an excess of programmatic. So, classic scaled content concepts could have been called “too much programmatic update”.
What I’ve noticed, and what I hope to see even more in the entries we’ll be judging in the next months, is how quickly people have started returning to building their own tools. It’s interesting because, in a way, it mirrors what you mentioned earlier. When you’re working with smaller budgets—compared to big brands or US and UK-based campaigns. You have to achieve the same results, but obviously, you have to be creative.
And I really like judging small business or small SEO campaigns where you see wonderful, wonderful campaigns achieved with a lot of creativity. And usually, that creativity comes from inventing your own tools.
Thank God, now with AI for SEO, the best use of AI is exactly this—the ability it gives us to create our own tools, much faster. This is an evolution I’ve really noticed.
The other evolution is seeing how the concept of content hubs, of clusters, of more integrated strategies—not just going “boom, boom, boom,” attacking one single tactic—has become more common. And that seems to be a symptom of growing maturity in the industry. But it’s really needed, because if SEO wants to survive these changes, we must really step up our game.
It’s no longer enough—or it’s going to be very short-lived—to rely on very basic tactics. Even if you can dress them up with fancy, flowery descriptions in a content marketing case strategy. No, if you’re creating thousands of blog posts just to chase even the most insignificant long-tail keywords.
So I think this approach is going to end, and I’m really happy about that. I see there are people who are already scaling up the game and now they are doing things properly and taking SEO more seriously, instead of always going the easy way.
Natalia Witczyk: I agree one hundred percent. And I just want to say that probably the people you described—the ones who look for unimportant changes and didn’t really adapt or level up—are the same people who now say that SEO is dead because the SEO they used to do is dead.
Everyone who’s staying up to date doesn’t have to throw away everything they’ve been doing and start something completely different. For them, SEO isn’t dead. It’s just that they know what they’re doing. They have for a while.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Now, these are the people who are maybe new to the game. They call themselves GEOs and are “rediscovering” tactics we were using 15 years ago to spam Google. And now, they present them as GEO tactics, like, “use H1” or “spam forums like there’s no tomorrow,” just because Reddit is heavily cited by AI Overviews or ChatGPT.
Beyond SEO: Getting to Know Natalia
Gianluca Fiorelli: Okay, it’s almost one hour now. Let’s close our serious SEO talk and talk about you. I want to ask you a few questions so people can get to know Natalia.
And, by the way, if you have Instagram, please follow Natalia first, because she has the best Instagram handle of the world, crap_influencer, which is very self-ironic. And secondly, because she shares cool things about her life—it’s really amusing.
So, Natalia, tell me—what’s the story behind this “crap influencer” handle? How did you come up with it?
Natalia Witczyk: Well, I tried several other handles that, unfortunately, didn’t pass Instagram’s moderation—and trust me, they were way worse. So, “crap influencer” is the best I could do… or maybe the worst I could do.
You know, I don’t usually talk about my Instagram in professional environments because it’s totally a personal project I do on the side. I just post things that make me laugh. Maybe someone else will laugh along the way, maybe they won’t, maybe they won’t find it funny at all—but that’s my main goal.
I kind of live this personal life of “influencing” and doing amazing stuff on a budget. Basically, that’s the bottom line. And yeah, if you’d like to see some of that—there’s no SEO talk, no seriousness ever—do follow me: crap_influencer.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Before, in the introduction, one of the ChatGPT definitions was “SEO Globe trotter” or something like that.
And yes, you’re like me. I’m Italian living in Spain, but I’ve also lived in other places before. You’re from Poland, you moved to Spain, and now you’re basically living on another planet—China. And with that wonderful flag behind you, you can definitely prove it.
So, of these three countries—even though China is still quite a recent experience for you—what are the things that really make you feel: “Okay, Poland is my house and home, Spain is also my home, and China is maybe becoming my home”. What are the three characteristics of these countries that make you think, “Wow, I love them”?
Natalia Witczyk: Well, I think that’s a tricky question because I haven’t lived in Poland for the last 10 years, and I feel more European than Polish in many ways. Just because, I think, the world is really small now, and we share so many European values. Even coming from Poland and moving to Spain, I could feel that the cultural codes are very similar, and I found my way quite easily there.
Of course, sometimes I also get upset about things that don’t work in Spain, like the tax system, and I complain about it. But, you know, I do it more because I consider Spain my home rather than anything else.
As for three things that are always the same, I think it’s amazing how some people focus a lot on the differences between countries—culture, food—but I tend to see similarities everywhere. For example, when you see small kids playing anywhere in the world, they’re all the same. They’re just kids. It doesn’t matter where they’re from or where they were born.
Sometimes, I even have little kids whose parents gently push towards me, like on the street, or in a supermarket, or in a shopping center. And they would approach me to try and say a few words in English because they have private English classes, or their parents are trying to teach them. Like this 4-year-old girl last weekend—she came up to me and said, “What’s your name?” in one breath. She obviously doesn’t speak fluently yet, but her parents want her to practice. You know, this is the cutest thing, and it shows that anywhere in the world, when you talk to small children, you can see that we are really the same as humans.
There’s a lot of importance placed on how you interact in society—like certain rules about who is the oldest, where they sit, who starts eating first, and how you follow social etiquette. I’m lucky enough to have a great Chinese teacher who’s also teaching me these elements of everyday life. She explained it to me, and I thought, “I never really think about it, but in Poland, we have that too.”
And if you’re well-behaved, you probably follow very similar rules. The differences are tiny. They’re smaller than we think. So, I don’t know if that really answers your question.
Gianluca Fiorelli: No, it answers the question. In fact, it’s a better answer than the one I was expecting you to give me.
Now, I have another question about you, which is a really simple one. In the morning, you’re working with your Chinese clients. In the afternoon, you’re working with all your other global, European, and Western clients. But what does Natalia like to do when she’s not working?
Natalia Witczyk: I spend a lot of time learning languages. I used to do it more for fun, but now I’m very serious about Chinese. I really want to master the language quickly, so I take classes four times a week.
Now, I’m going to tell you a trick that my teachers don’t know about. I actually have two Chinese teachers—and they don’t know about each other.
I have one teacher, once a week, who likes to teach English to foreigners as a hobby. And then I have another teacher, three times a week, who is a serious lecturer teaching me all the grammar and pronunciation.
Neither of them knows that I’m studying with the other one, so they each give me compliments, thinking I’m progressing so well. But this is just because I have that extra learning opportunity with the other teacher that they don’t know about
I also figured out that I like spending time with people. I’m a very extroverted person—for an SEO. I hear that a lot. So, instead of spending time alone at home trying to learn in a way that doesn’t work for me, I prefer to do it with people. Meeting with someone and showing them what I’ve learned is the biggest motivator for me.
And when I’m not doing that—which is still more often than not—I try to go to the gym. I actually started to take my health seriously after the pandemic. Before that, I had never exercised in my entire life. I wasn’t even the kind of person who would run to catch a bus if it was just a hundred meters away—I was too lazy. But then I turned 30, and I said, “Enough with that nonsense.” Enough with that stupidity—I said to myself, I’m going to take care of myself. That was the missing puzzle piece in my personal and professional development. So, I took sports seriously, and now I go to the gym and do weight training, because I keep hearing that’s the best thing a woman can do.
A lot of women are afraid of getting muscles, but I’m the opposite. I want to get the muscles. I’m proud of my biceps! So I’ve become a bit of a gym rat.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Well, I should take you as an example. Maybe my dislike for exercise is still too big to actually try, but I always think about improving myself in that way, too.
Thank you, Natalia. It was a real pleasure having you as a guest on The Search Session. I really hope that in the future we can do another episode. Maybe by then, you’ll have moved to another country, and you’ll tell me, “Here in South Africa, things work like this.” Maybe.
Natalia Witczyk: Who knows? The world is very small.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Exactly. Okay, thank you. And thanks to everyone who watched this episode. Now let me do the YouTube stuff—remember to ring the bell, subscribe to the channel, and give a like to this episode, because it was a really good one. Thank you!
Natalia Witczyk: Thank you!
Podcast Host
Gianluca Fiorelli
With almost 20 years of experience in web marketing, Gianluca Fiorelli is a Strategic and International SEO Consultant who helps businesses improve their visibility and performance on organic search. Gianluca collaborated with clients from various industries and regions, such as Glassdoor, Idealista, Rastreator.com, Outsystems, Chess.com, SIXT Ride, Vegetables by Bayer, Visit California, Gamepix, James Edition and many others.
A very active member of the SEO community, Gianluca daily shares his insights and best practices on SEO, content, Search marketing strategy and the evolution of Search on social media channels such as X, Bluesky and LinkedIn and through the blog on his website: IloveSEO.net.
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