Welcome back to you all. I’m Gianluca Fiorelli, and today I’ll be talking with Celeste Gonzalez, an SEO and SXO strategist specialized in local search.
We explore how AI is changing local search, from Ask Maps and review sentiment to ChatGPT’s growing role, and define what search experience optimization (SXO) really means.
From user experience and testing to the growing role of short-form video, this conversation covers the key factors shaping local visibility.
What You’ll Learn
AI in local SEO and Ask Maps accuracy: incomplete or unclear business information can lead to incorrect AI outputs, making consistency across channels essential.
Reviews as LLM fuel for local SEO: Ask Maps mines reviews for unique selling points and what matters has shifted from quantity and ratings to differentiators, freshness, and sentiment trends.
ChatGPT in local search: despite lower accuracy in recommendations, it drives most referral traffic due to widespread adoption.
SXO and ROI: SEO doesn’t stop at the click; it extends across the full user journey and business results.
UX signals and rankings: what rage clicks, dead clicks, and quick backs mean and why fixing them can improve visibility and rankings.
Testing SXO: simple, data-driven experiments combining SEO and user behavior insights.
SXO meets CRO: better experiences lead to faster conversions and stronger outcomes.
Online meets offline: aligning in-store and digital experiences to support reputation and performance.
Short-form video and local SEO: measuring its impact on branded search and building realistic video strategies for local businesses.
Tune in to the full episode to learn how to navigate modern local search and turn visibility into real results.
Topics covered: Local SEO · AI in local search · Ask Maps · Reviews and sentiment · Search Experience Optimization (SXO) · UX signals · SXO testing · Offline experience · Short-form video
About the Guest
Celeste Gonzalez
Director of RooLabs at RicketyRoo
Celeste Gonzalez is a local SEO strategist and testing specialist with expertise in content marketing and UX optimization.
She has been at RicketyRoo since 2021, moving from SEO Specialist to Strategist and now leading RooLabs, the agency's SEO testing division. Her focus is on bridging rankings, user behavior, and real business outcomes through data-driven experimentation.
Alongside her agency work, she has been running her own freelance SEO consultancy since 2021, supporting businesses in improving their search visibility and performance.
She is a frequent speaker at industry events, sharing insights on local SEO, testing, and search experience optimization, and is also a writer, contributing to Search Engine Land and BrightLocal, as well as to Advanced Web Ranking.
Transcript
Read the full conversation between Gianluca Fiorelli and Celeste Gonzalez
Gianluca Fiorelli: Hi, and welcome back to The Search Session. I'm Gianluca Fiorelli, and today we are going to have a guest directly from Los Angeles, USA. She's the director of RooLabs at RicketyRoo, and she leads—and we are going to talk about this—experimental SEO testing with the purpose of bridging the gap between traditional search rankings and real-world user behavior.
In that sense, she's one of the best-known specialists in the so-called search experience optimization, SXO—I will try not to confuse myself because, in Spanish, it's a weird acronym because it sounds like sex—and local SEO.
Our guest is a frequent speaker at events like BrightonSEO in San Diego. She is also a contributor to Search Engine Land. She’s a very nice discovery for me in the sense that I started to follow her relatively recently, and I was really impressed. Surely, you know her, because she is Celeste Gonzalez. How are you doing?
Celeste Gonzalez: Hi. I am doing well. How are you?
Gianluca Fiorelli: I'm fine. For me, it's the end of the day; for you, the start of the day.
AI in Local Search: Opportunities and Accuracy Risks
Gianluca Fiorelli: Here is the classic question that I ask all my guests: How has SEO been treating you in the last week?
Celeste Gonzalez: It has been treating me pretty well. I'm very excited about the changes happening. On the local side, I’m seeing all the Ask Maps information that everyone is sharing and getting to talk about that with clients. There’s lots of education there. It’s been exciting, not boring.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Cool. You immediately introduced a good topic that I wanted to talk about with you, which is the AI search side of local search, so also Ask Maps.
At the very beginning, local search was somehow safe from things like AI Overviews, AI Mode, but also, in certain cases, from LLMs like ChatGPT. Things have changed. How are you seeing this introduction of AI in a niche like local SEO, which, in many ways, really needs to be grounded in reality? And we know that sometimes AI has this tendency to not really be faithful to grounded sources. How are you seeing this evolution?
Celeste Gonzalez: Just starting by saying that it’s not always accurate on the Ask Maps side of things. It’s been fun diving in and seeing where the issues can happen. Specifically, Ask Maps about this place. When you go on Google Maps and you can click on a specific place, let’s say a restaurant, dentist, or home service provider that has a physical location, you can prompt it and ask some questions, and sometimes, if there's not enough information, it will say, "I don't have enough information to answer this question," which is great. That's what you'd like to see.
But it's not always the case. Sometimes it can pull in information that's not correct if you have a similar business name. What I've seen is that it can even pull in Instagram or Facebook. It shows the sources that it's using, and it can show them for other businesses if that information is missing from yours and they happen to have a similar business name.
So I think it's an exciting time because it's forcing more small businesses, and local businesses too, to think more about the user and think about these things that they can run into. It pushes them to work a little harder on their website and make sure information is there, or on their GBP, helping them understand that they have to put in some level of effort on the small business side.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, and from what you were saying, that AI can eventually pull up sources like Instagram or social media, that means attention to the omnichannel nature of marketing, which is so popular right now.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It’s also becoming fundamental for small businesses, or not necessarily only small businesses, because local is so pervasive. Big enterprise companies can have strong local business facets in their digital presence. Let’s think about Walmart, Zara, and all these big companies.
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Reviews as the New "Unique Selling Point" for LLMs
Gianluca Fiorelli: In fact, one of the things you were also talking about is something you defined very well, which is the LLM blind spot, which may be related to this. Correct me if I’m wrong. Reviews have always been considered very important for local search. Are they even more important now for LLMs?
Celeste Gonzalez: I definitely believe so. Aside from LLMs, just with the Ask Maps updates, that’s the biggest thing that local SEOs are talking about right now. With Ask Maps about this place, it appears that the first place this feature is pulling from is reviews. It is pulling the sentiment and the text from them.
So when you look at it, it will say "Know before you go." It could be a dentist, and it could say they make you feel very comfortable. That’s not something anybody was optimizing for. People weren’t specifically targeting “comfortable dentists” or dentists who send a birthday card or make a phone call. Nobody was optimizing for those types of keywords. That was not a thing.
But it’s what’s getting pulled because it’s what that AI feature believes would be a standout point or a unique selling point to people, and it believes that might be what’s important to them. So a dentist making them feel very comfortable is something that appears in the “Know before you go,” and that’s pulled from the reviews.
With the questions that are shown on Ask Maps about this place, you might see things like "Do they offer massage chairs?" Let’s say it’s a dentist, or “Do they offer anything to help you feel more comfortable?” The first place you see once you click into that question is the reviews. Yes, they mention massage chairs, or they made me feel very comfortable and talked me through the procedure.
It’s picking up the sentiment and the exact words being used there. So seeing it in those AI-related features opens up a broader conversation about sentiment in general for LLMs and thinking about it even for other verticals and industries.
If your business is mentioned, what is being said becomes more important. You can run all these prompts and see that there are mentions, but what is being mentioned about your brand? What is being mentioned about the other brands? Which one would you choose based on these mentions? What are the unique selling points being highlighted? What are the things you may not like that are being pulled in? That can come from your reviews. Everything is fair game.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, in other words, reviews are used, in this case by Gemini, because Gemini is feeding Google Maps, to find the things that make a local business unique.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And from what I understood from what you were saying about sentiment, sentiment can be the equivalent of trust. If the sentiment is positive, then that means the person reviewing also trusts the brand in local search.
But wasn’t sentiment already somehow a ranking factor used by Google Maps in the past? Because I remember, many years ago, there was this complaint from local search marketers that local businesses with awful reviews but very well-optimized profiles were outranking others with very good reviews but less optimization for other ranking factors. So Google started to use sentiment to differentiate good small businesses from bad ones. Is this somehow an evolution of that?
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes, I believe it has just become more important at this point. Previously, it was more on the quantitative side of the data, like the number of reviews, the optimization, and simply having more positive reviews or a higher star rating. And people were also taking into consideration the review text, like trying to include keywords in the reviews.
But now it’s not just that anymore. It has evolved into more, including those unique selling points, the things that make a local business stand out or be different from its competitors.
Freshness, Review Velocity, and Reputation Recovery in Local Search
Gianluca Fiorelli: Interesting. My next question would be this: are reviews considered some sort of freshness signal, like in the news niche, or not? And secondly, related to this, how important is governance becoming in this case? Because when it was just the classic ten blue links, we used to say that if something was on the second page, nobody would see it.
With LLMs in general, including Gemini, even the oldest, strangest, or most negative things that you were able to hide in classic search can now surface. So these two questions may be related, or maybe not. Is there some kind of freshness in how sentiment is considered, or not? And what happens if sentiment was bad in the past and is positive now, so there is an evolution?
Celeste Gonzalez: I believe it’s all relevant. Everything is fair game. With the freshness aspect, based on my experience and what I’ve done with my clients, freshness is a good thing. It is something you want. It’s useful to track how things change over time, along with their results visibility.
So, I created a Chrome extension to track and pull sentiment from GBP reviews. One of the elements included is review velocity, so you can see how often those are coming in. That gives you a way to track, and you’re able to see how sentiment can change over time and what those could change in “know before you go,” or the answers given in those Ask Maps about this place questions.
These are all things where you want to have historical data to work with and to track. I believe things can be changed, though. Just because there were negative things in the past doesn’t mean that you have to give up or that it’s over.
If you do the work to fix the things people were originally complaining about or being proactive about certain aspects, it is possible to gain ground and work your way back up.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, interesting. I know you created, you vibe-coded, this Chrome extension. I will come back to the vibe coding topic later.
ChatGPT vs. Gemini for Local Search Discovery
Gianluca Fiorelli: Before that, I want to move a bit from Google Maps to LLMs. Let’s talk about ChatGPT, because it is the most used by the mainstream population. I wanted to know, from a professional who works in local search, how you would evaluate ChatGPT in terms of local search?
Celeste Gonzalez: It’s okay. I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite. Since it is mainly adopted by regular users, that’s where we see the bulk of referrals coming from on the local side. When we track this for different businesses, like home services, catering, photography, dental, medical, and anything like that, the majority of referrals are coming from ChatGPT.
So it’s there, it’s happening, it’s rising. When I try it as a user, I wouldn’t say it is the best. For example, if I’m traveling and looking for recommendations, I wouldn’t say it’s better than Gemini at this point, based on how I’ve been testing and using it in my own experience.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, personally, I agree with your experience. I don’t know if I would use ChatGPT for very specific information about local businesses. I would probably use Gemini more, because it’s Google. Also, it’s not really clear where ChatGPT pulls its information from. I would be quite skeptical about searching for things like phone numbers or contacts in ChatGPT when it comes to information about a business. Hallucinations are still quite significant, at least from what I’ve seen.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I don’t know if it is really using Bing or scraping Google through other means. When it presents products, everything makes us suspect that it is using the Google Merchant feed, even though it could be using the Bing feed.
Explaining Search Experience Optimization (SXO) to Clients
Gianluca Fiorelli: Let’s talk about search experience optimization. I think it’s a great concept. It’s a vertical that, if we think about the messy middle, we usually consider the trigger and then the phase between exploration and consideration. But there is another phase, which is the experience. That’s when people land on the website.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Search experience optimization is exactly about that: how to optimize the experience. Considering that clicks and traffic are harder to obtain now, how do we get the best out of those clicks? How would you explain to a classic SEO what search experience optimization, SXO, really is?
Celeste Gonzalez: I believe that using “experience” instead of “engine” makes it more encompassing of what we should be striving to do and what many people are now focusing on.
Old-school SEO reporting says that once you get the click, the job is done. But that’s not true. The job is not done there, because reporting should not be based on clicks. It should be based on ROI and what you are able to drive from the traffic that you are able to bring in.
That means considering the experience you are offering the user on the website. This includes reviewing how they interact with it through session recordings, looking at heat maps, and scroll depth.
I am not against bounce rate. I know that was something that was really hammered into before. Yes, focusing on the website and on the user behavior data that we have access to now, as users are still on the website at this point in time, is important. But at the same time, it’s about considering other experiences.
Many people are talking about YouTube now. LLMs are citing YouTube much more. People are talking about Reddit. These are different places where people are searching. There are different experiences, and SXO considers those as well.
It’s not always a simple path where you go to Google, search for something, visit a website, and make a purchase. There are many other touchpoints and experiences that need to be considered.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, in that sense, it can be seen as a new vision of SEO, or a specific vision of SEO. It could be compared to another definition of SEO that has become quite popular recently, which is “search everywhere optimization."
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, mostly because you were saying that the experience can also happen in the SERP, making your brand pervasive and visible everywhere. And that everywhere presence should match with, for instance, a YouTube video that can be watched directly on the SERP.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So you should think about a YouTube video in a way that offers a good experience, even if it’s on the SERP. I know that can be quite difficult for certain people to understand, but it's the same fact that the container is different from a classic YouTube or a television. To be more common, to be seen, to be watched on YouTube, you have to consider this kind of influence from the container on your content.
Another way I explain experience, because I was also talking about experience optimization many years ago, especially when collaborating with in-house teams as a consultant, is to align the concept of experience, as you’re describing it, with what Google has already been telling us.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It’s not a case that things like speed, security, and all these aspects of a website are put under page experience in Google Search Console.
There are also more technical terms that have emerged over the past couple of years, like long clicks, good clicks, bad clicks, all from this Navboost and the DOJ process, which are substantially pointing in the direction of experience.
So I think this is my little trick to explain search experience optimization. So, combining the collaboration of UX, and not only UX, but also conversion rate optimization, because we can also try to match these things. It’s a good way to help SEOs understand the concept.
How do you approach this with clients? How do you help them make the shift from classic SEO, focused on visibility of 10 clicks, to thinking about how to make those clicks count?
Celeste Gonzalez: I am fortunate that with local clients, they always ask, “What’s my ROI?" “What's my return on this?” or “I’m spending this much per month; how do I know what I’m going to get back?” Those conversations are pretty top of mind in local SEO.
I would say especially with small businesses, because whatever their budget may be, it could be the only thing they are spending on for marketing. Or they may have been burned before by previous agencies, so they have a lot more questions about this.
On the client side, it is always top of mind what they are going to get back aside from clicks. A click is cool, but what is going into my pocket? Having that centered in their mind during these conversations makes it easier to get them to consider user experience, like page layout updates, and things like that, which are a bit different from traditional SEO.
I like to pull up tools like Microsoft Clarity, I am an ambassador for them, but you can use whatever tool you have at your disposal, like Hotjar or Crazy Egg. Show them the session recordings. Show them where the frustration is. There are frustration metrics like rage clicks, dead clicks, and excessive scrolling.
On the scroll side, you can also show them that people are not scrolling on their pages. This means that a piece of content they worked hard on, or a previous agency worked hard on, is not being read or interacted with.
On the local side, some things are simple. You may have only one CTA button at the bottom of the page, and nobody is reaching it.
Going through and showing where frustration happens in session recordings or on those heat maps is very helpful. It is very telling, and clients can actually see what you are talking about. It becomes more than just a concept, because you are able to show real proof and help them decide what they want to do about it.
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Technical Metrics of User Frustration
Gianluca Fiorelli: Interesting, and I have a very silly question. You were talking about the sentiment and psychological nature of traffic and experiences, and now it’s coming out again. We talked about it before with reviews, and now we are talking about clicks and metrics.
Can you explain very quickly—for somebody who is not used to these terms and to avoid a misunderstanding, which is the worst thing in SEO—what a rage click is, and what is the difference between a rage click, a dead click, and a quick back?
Celeste Gonzalez: With rage clicks, I am sure we have all experienced them. You can be on your phone, scrolling, and you click on a button, but you are not getting a response, so you keep clicking it multiple times because you want it to respond. That counts as a rage click.
A dead click might be that first click in that interaction. You click on a button, and nothing happens, and you wait to see if it is going to load or not. You are stuck there, and that is typically counted as a dead click.
I will say that, especially on mobile, some clicks can be counted as dead clicks even if they are not, because when you scroll on your phone, you can accidentally tap instead of scrolling. Sometimes you can see that in dead click behavior. I just wanted to clarify that.
With quick backs, it could be that you accidentally tap on something and it takes you to another page, and you realize that is not where you wanted to go, so you go back. That could be the case, or you land on a page and think this is not what I expected or not what I was looking for, so you go back. If it happens very quickly, it is counted as a quick back.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Okay, I understand. When you were describing them, I could picture all the examples from my own experience.
Just as an anecdote, sometimes it is a mix of everything: a rage click, a dead click, and a quick back. For instance, when you are reading news from Discover on mobile.
Celeste Gonzalez: Oh my gosh.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And all of a sudden, you are scrolling, swiping down, and by mistake, you tap a Temu advertisement, and you are moved to a new window in your Google app or Chrome app. So you have to quit it and return. It can be very frustrating.
Considering your work in labs and dealing with these metrics, what kind of correlation have you seen between negative metrics like rage clicks, dead clicks, and quick backs, and losing visibility?
Celeste Gonzalez: I will say that one thing that has been tested and talked about many times, sometimes in an exhausting way, is accordions.
A lot of times, there can be dead clicks on accordions because people click on them but not in the right way, so they don’t open. I see that in session recordings. Or you are making them work to get the information, and people don’t want to work for it.
Especially now, with ChatGPT or AI Overviews, people feel like they don’t need to go to the website anymore. My answer is right there. Having the accordion up, you are making them work to then click. They already clicked into your website; now they have to click into an accordion to see the information and get their questions answered.
In my testing, when we removed the accordions, we did see visibility improve, in terms of rankings. And also, because rankings improved, clicks improved as well.
That was not necessarily the goal of the testing in the beginning. We wanted to see what would happen if we removed them and removed some of that frustration, to get people to have the information to then make a decision on what they wanted to do next. But it did help visibility as well.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Interesting. I think there may also be other implications related to how Google weighs content, whether it is in an accordion or not in place.
This may seem like a weird question, but from all the sessions you have watched, what is the weirdest thing you have seen people do on a website that you did not expect could happen?
Celeste Gonzalez: That’s a good question, not a weird one. I have seen some very weird sessions where I think, "What happened?" Their phone might have been in their bag or in their pocket while they were on the website, because of how it scrolled, jumped, and clicked in a strange way. Then it would just be still for a while, with no movement, but they were still on the page, and then suddenly it exits.
There have been some strange recordings where the metrics do not look good, and it turns out they were not actively using their phone, but it may have been accidental interaction in their pocket or bag.
You see it, and you can have a client say, “What is going on here?", “What happened?” I would say those have been pretty weird sessions to watch, because at first it might seem like there is a user there, and sometimes it may not be.
Human vs. Bot Behavior in Session Recordings
Gianluca Fiorelli: Another question, maybe related to this. In these session recordings, can it happen that what is being recorded is not really a human, but a bot?
Celeste Gonzalez: From my experience reviewing sessions, I would say there are sessions that look like bots and not humans.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And you can recognize that, maybe like when you compare a real photograph to an AI-generated one? Like with hands, AI still has problems with hands and fingers. How did you start to recognize that a session is not from a human but from a bot? Did you notice any kind of patterns?
Celeste Gonzalez: I don’t think there is any such thing as a perfect session when it’s a human. That’s part of the experience I was talking about. You are scrolling on your phone, and you accidentally tap. Maybe there was nothing to tap; it was just text, but it gets counted as a dead click. You accidentally tap when you were just trying to continue scrolling. There are lots of imperfect behaviors in human sessions.
Things that look like bot sessions are too perfect. They scroll perfectly, click on the next page, and everything looks very clean. There are efficient people who can do that, but when these sessions tend to look too perfect to be real, that’s when you start to question them and watch more closely.
On Microsoft Clarity, there is a feature where you can see bot traffic separately. That’s a newer feature. I haven’t explored it too much yet, but it’s something you can consider looking into as you analyze your own data.
Designing a Holistic SEO Testing Process
Gianluca Fiorelli: Interesting. I want to move to another topic, which we already touched on when you were talking about accordions and testing.
From what I’ve read from you, you do a lot of testing and plan many tests for your clients. I recently talked about SEO testing with Ryan Jones. Until recently, he was working at SEOTesting.
More on the Testing Side of SEO with Ryan Jones
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Gianluca Fiorelli: What about you? What is your process when designing an SEO test?
Celeste Gonzalez: I absolutely love Ryan Jones’ work, and I love SEOTesting.com. We use that tool as well to run our tests and see our data before and after split tests. It’s a great tool.
When it comes to coming up with hypotheses and ideas for testing, since this is my department, I do monthly data reviews for our clients. I like to dive in and see what’s going on in Search Console, what’s happening with their GBP data if we want to do some GBP testing, and also look into their user behavior data. So it always starts there.
It could also start with a question from the client. I manage some clients as well, and during conversations they might ask, “What about this? Could we try something like this?”, or " Can you look at this page for me?”
And some of the other AMs, like Aimee Jurenka might ask me to take a look at something, or Blake Denman might ask me to do the same. And it can just start there. A simple question to look at a specific page, or me looking into the data on my own and coming to some sort of hypothesis.
I like to look at it holistically. It is not just the Search Console data. I am looking into the Clarity data. I like to see what is going on with the people who did end up on the page. If we are doing GBP testing, I like to look at Whitespark, BrightLocal, and the insights we have in our custom reports. It always starts with the data.
Testing ideas does not have to be too crazy. You see test result studies from SEOTesting.com or SearchPilot, and they can be very simple things like title tag testing. It can be H1 testing and seeing how important that can be, doing that instead of a title tag test.
Not counting out any of the simple things like that is important. And if we are looking at it from a user behavior perspective, that is where we can be more creative and consider what we would want to see if we were someone landing on that page and considering those services and looking at some of the above the fold stuff.
And when you had talked about patents earlier, when I was doing my presentations on search experience optimization and testing, there is one that I found that Google places a lot more importance on the above the fold content on mobile. That’s something that we test quite a bit.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. As someone coming not from a developer background but from a humanistic studies background, I think it is logical. We often forget what Google wants to do, which is to think and act like a human being.
And actually, like a Western human being. That is why Google has problems with non-Western languages. As someone working in international SEO, I know this very well.
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Gianluca Fiorelli: So, the classic idea is that the most important things are the ones on the left and above. Instead of on the right and below. This is something that has always been true everywhere, even in television. Why is the logo of a channel always down on the right? Because it is a blind spot, nobody looks there.
So it should also be available for reading and scanning content. And the above the fold is important, especially with the complications of mobile design. This happens with small businesses and with businesses of every kind, where the above the fold is often taken up by a very large hero image.
It may be great in terms of branding, value proposition, or marketing messaging, but not as important for positioning, rankings, and visibility.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So you are essentially doing SEO testing in terms of search experience optimization testing, just to be clear.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It’s interesting. Did you find that this kind of testing also leads to improvements in conversion rate, for instance? A sort of intersection with classic CRO A/B testing?
Celeste Gonzalez: I would say it definitely intersects, and it is something we look at and try to report on for certain tests. If you are making the user experience better on a service page or a product page, you are likely going to get people to fill out the form, click on the CTA, or add to cart.
By helping someone get to where they want faster, they will likely convert faster. So it is something to report on and to look at.
SEO tests need clean before-and-after visibility data.
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Connecting the Digital and Analog Experience
Gianluca Fiorelli: Interesting. And since we are talking about experience—one of my clients is a local business, even if it has a nationwide presence in the US, it is really local, with stores and so on—for a long time, I have been seeing the importance of connecting everything we do in the digital presence of a client with the offline, non-digital, let’s call it analogical, in-store experience.
How much of your work involves this offline, analogical experience, to avoid creating this uncanny valley between what happens online and what happens offline, in the store?
Celeste Gonzalez: So I’d say I do get to focus on that a lot more in my freelance work. But at RicketyRoo or with any sort of local businesses, it does show up in your reviews based on what the offline experience was or the customer service, like surveys and feedback that you're getting, based on how they were treated on the phone call, or when they visited the restaurant or cafe, or when they reached out for a quote.
So those offline experiences can impact online experiences when people leave reviews or comments on social media. There are ways that you're able to monitor it online with that, and also by getting survey data, call logs, things like that, to look at some of that offline activity.
It’s a little hard on the SEO side to be able to say, "Hey, people are complaining about customer service, and something should be done about that because now it can impact your reviews and that can impact your visibility.” They’re tough conversations to have because it's like, how much of this do we own? But at the end of the day, if it can show up in reviews, if it can show up in social media comments, it's something to bring to a client.
Short-Form Video, TikTok, and Local Search Visibility
Gianluca Fiorelli: Totally. Totally. And talking about social media, you also recently touched on the area of short video, TikTok specifically. And when I was reading your notes about this, I thought, “Yes, this is something that I’m noticing too.” And not only because already a few years ago, the former head of search of Google was red-alerting about how the younger generation, especially, was using Instagram; in this case, he was talking especially of Instagram. Obviously, it can also be TikTok for performing local searches.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: But creating a video strategy is difficult, even if it's a short video strategy. Because the things that I see, the things that are really prized by Instagram or TikTok, are not really easy to produce.
Even if the business is so small, like a single tour operator or tour guide, they are very complex videos. It at least demands someone operating a camera or someone using a very good smartphone.
Two questions here: first, were you able to quantify the impact of short-form social video on the overall success of a local business as a whole—for the website, Google Business Profile, and Google Maps? And second, how do you approach building a video strategy for local businesses?
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes, in terms of metrics and measurement impact, it’s correlative with search because we can get the metrics from TikTok, and they do have their creator search insights. You can see them on the app, but there are APIs and connectors to get that data, like Metricool, and you can correlate it with your Google Search Console data.
I like doing that, looking at branded queries, and putting those alongside what the TikTok or YouTube posting schedule looks like and how performance was doing there. Because let’s say you had an exceptional video on TikTok, it performed exceptionally. I’m not saying it has to go viral, but it did really well for your account and what your metrics are used to.
It could impact branded searches at that point. Users see you on TikTok, then go into Google and search for the business and see how close or far away it is from them. Should they make a visit? Should they pick up the phone? So it can impact branded search in that way.
So it is correlative, it’s not going to be absolute, like because this video went viral, we now know that everyone is searching for us in branded queries from Search Console. But it’s helpful in seeing that there can be a connection there.
In terms of thinking about video strategy, it always depends on what the client can actually spend time and money doing. Because especially on the local side, sometimes efforts are spread thin, and if they don't have the time or the resources to invest in video like that and in keeping up with it, then it's not going to be something that we're saying to go all in on. It might not be the fit for every single person.
I think it's still important, and the way that you can still win it is by just providing really good service, because there's lots of user-generated content on TikTok as well. By providing that good in-person experience, you can get videos produced about what that is, and you can get people talking on social about you.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, so using user-generated content, spontaneous videos or maybe not so spontaneous, maybe you are nudging; you can nudge the client to do the video.
And it's clearly a good idea, both as a complementary video strategy and maybe your own video strategy if you cannot produce a video by yourself. But when you were talking about the correlation, I couldn’t help but think about doing a sort of double-depth jump.
Can’t we consider the correlation between the visibility we can have with our short videos on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube—and also considering that these shorts are a special SERP feature on Google Search—with what could be the same kind of brand visibility in LLMs? Because we are always asking how we can find a correlation between being very visible in LLMs, also on a local level, and the actual impact on traffic. ChatGPT sometimes give us referral traffic, but usually that is not the norm.
Usually, the traffic correlates with branded searches. Can’t we find a relationship, a correlation, using a similar methodology to what you are using for correlating the impact of short videos, to also correlate that same kind of impact for brand mentions on LLMs, on AI Overview, in AI Mode?
Celeste Gonzalez: I think so, yes. You can definitely track SERPs, especially on local. You can see TikTok pulled in, you can see YouTube Shorts pulled in, or just YouTube in general pulled in. It is something you absolutely can track, and something you have a little bit more control over, getting to see what that looks like.
Especially working with agencies, they don’t have an in-house social media person; they likely have someone else doing their social media, so it’s a lot of collaborating and coordinating. But you can always track the SERP and see how that can change over time with those videos popping up.
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Celeste Gonzalez: As far as LLMs, let’s say ChatGPT mentions TikToks, I’ve researched it and looked at some of the tools that make TikTok data available. I haven’t seen anything that would show you the referral traffic to your TikTok.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, no?
Celeste Gonzalez: Unfortunately. But they are adding AI features to TikTok as well. They have their Ask Tako, and it does cite websites and local businesses there as well. So you can track the referrals from TikTok, too.
Closing Thoughts: Community and Personal Passions
Gianluca Fiorelli: Cool, cool. Interesting. I was looking, almost one hour. So let’s stop talking about local search and let’s talk about you. I have two questions for you. One is more about profession. What is something you would have loved to be told when you were starting your career?
Celeste Gonzalez: Oh, wow. That’s a very big question. Communities were just starting out, like the Women in Tech SEO community, and they were able to make that a very safe space to ask questions.
I joined as a blogger. I was just working on my own website, learning as much SEO as possible. I was on Twitter, following people, and I was very intimidated. I didn’t know anyone. I would follow everyone, but not necessarily engage.
If people had made it more comfortable to ask questions, that would have helped. I did see sort of like the Twitter back and forth when people shared opinions.
I feel like the community has gotten a little bit better. I know now we’re mainly on LinkedIn or in private Slack channels. Noah Learner has done a great thing with the SEO community. So I think if people were saying, "Just ask questions; it’s not a dumb question. We’ve all had these questions before, or maybe we haven’t thought about it.”
So, having someone from the very beginning say, “Just jump into the conversation and don’t worry about it.”
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. I have a friend who would say, "Don't give a frack, enter into the conversation.” Because, usually, this SEO community, apart from a few exceptions, is quite welcoming with newer generations. Even if, for instance, it’s me and I say, "I have to explain it another time," it’s not a problem.
It’s always better to explain one more time than not explaining and leaving things unclear for someone who doesn’t know anything. This is my philosophy.
And apart from that, what does Celeste like to do?
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes. I really like to strength train. I do a lot of weight training and lifting. I am into bodybuilding. No show date yet, but I’m still building the muscle to be ready to get to the stage eventually.
I also really love Legos, so in my free time I like building the Lego botanicals.
Gianluca Fiorelli: But do you like Lego to build your own stuff or…
Celeste Gonzalez: I get the kits. I love the Botanicals, how beautiful they are. The flowers never die. I have a couple on my desk right now. I also like puzzles. SEO is sort of a puzzle, so it makes sense that one of my other hobbies would be puzzles.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I can relate to it. People know that I like to paint mini soldiers. And I think doing puzzles and Lego is a way to free your mind. I don’t know if it’s your case, but sometimes the best ideas I had were when I was painting, because I was not thinking about it. So things come up naturally. I don’t know if it’s your case.
Celeste Gonzalez: It definitely helps me clear my mind. I feel more accomplished with it, and later in the day, since my mind is clearer, more thoughts come to my head, more ideas. If you’re not thinking about it, it makes it easier to have something to run with.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And people are going to be lucky enough to see you talking very soon at some conference.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes. I will be hosting a mastermind session at SMX Advanced, and also speaking at the SEOFOMO meetup the day before the conference, which is in Boston.
Gianluca Fiorelli: In Boston.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I saw the announcement by Aleyda.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes, that is going to be so exciting. I haven’t seen Aleyda in like two years, so I’m very excited to see her again. And then I have Women in Tech Philadelphia in October and BrightonSEO San Diego, I think that’s in September.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Cool. As a European, I would have loved to hear some European conference popping up. Let’s see, let’s push for having Celeste on this side of the pond.
Celeste Gonzalez: Yes, I hope so, 2027.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Okay, perfect. Celeste, it was a great pleasure to have you as my guest here at The Search Session.
Celeste Gonzalez: Thank you so much. This was a great conversation. I had a lot of fun.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Thank you, and thank you also to all of you. Remember to ring the bell to be notified and to subscribe. We are going to have other wonderful guests here at The Search Session. Thank you and bye-bye.
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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