Why SEOs Need to Stop Waiting for Perfect Data and Start Building Their Own

In this week’s episode of Voices of Search, we spoke with Celeste Gonzalez, SEO Testing Director at RicketyRoo and founder of the LA SEO Meetup Group, about what it actually looks like to dive into creative, scrappy SEO work in a world where the old data sources are breaking down.

Celeste came up through blogging and freelancing before spending nearly five years at RicketyRoo, working her way from junior SEO specialist to leading the testing department. Despite having zero coding background, she’s built her own Chrome extensions, data pipelines, and sentiment analysis tools entirely through Vibe coding. Her perspective on where SEO is heading is grounded in real client work, real experiments, and a genuine belief that the practitioners who figure out how to build their own tools will have a meaningful edge over those waiting for platforms to catch up.

Today, she broke down the concept of search experience optimization, why social data is one of the most underused signals in the industry, and how any SEO can start building lightweight tools that make their work faster and smarter.

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

• Search experience optimization (SXO) isn’t a new acronym for its own sake. It’s a more honest description of what SEO actually is now: optimizing for user experience across every channel, not just rankings.
• Social engagement data is one of the most actionable and underused signals available. What performs on TikTok or Instagram tells you something real about what users want, and that insight translates directly to search and AI strategy.
• Building your own tools doesn’t require a coding background. Starting small, solving one tedious problem at a time, and using tools like Claude Code is enough to get meaningful results.
• Reviews are increasingly central to local SEO, especially as Google’s AI features pull directly from review language to answer conversational queries on Maps.
• Competitor review analysis is an underrated source of content strategy. Their weaknesses are your client’s opportunities.
• Human community is becoming more valuable, not less, as AI saturates every digital channel.

What Search Experience Optimization Actually Means

Before diving into tactics, it’s worth understanding what Celeste means by search experience optimization, because it’s a term that could easily get dismissed as just another acronym.

The concept, which Celeste credits to researcher and author Sarah Fernandez Carmona, is essentially a reframe of what good SEO has always required: combining search optimization with UX principles, and centering the user rather than the search engine. 

“We are optimizing for user experiences,” Celeste said. “We are trying to get them to, yes, make it to the website in some cases, but eventually convert from an organic channel—and it doesn’t matter where it’s coming from.”

In practice, that means accepting that the crawl-index-rank-traffic model is no longer the full picture. Users discover brands through Google, ChatGPT, TikTok, Maps, reviews, and a dozen other surfaces. SXO is the acknowledgment that optimizing for all of those touchpoints, and understanding how users move between them, is now the actual job.

Reviews Are No Longer Just a “Local SEO Signal”

One of the most concrete shifts Celeste has observed in the past 12 months is how central review language has become to Google’s AI features, particularly in local search.

Google’s Ask Maps feature, which launched as a conversational search tool within Google Maps, pulls first and foremost from review content—and specifically from the language that real customers use. 

“It’s all based on the language that these customers are using,” Celeste explained. “So while reviews have always been important in the local SEO space, in the past 24 months, the way people are talking about reviews has changed a lot.”

The implication for local businesses is direct: the words your customers are using in reviews are increasingly the words that show up in AI-generated answers about your business. This is exactly what makes review content a strategic asset, and not just a reputation management task.

Social Data as a Search Strategy Signal

One of the more counterintuitive arguments Celeste makes is that social engagement data, TikTok comments, Instagram performance, and video views are some of the richest and most underused signals available to SEOs right now.

The logic is straightforward. When a piece of content performs well on social, it’s because real users found it relevant, interesting, or useful. That signal predates and often predicts what will work in search and AI discovery. “Real social engagement is a clear indicator of something that’s working,” Celeste said. “It’s a clear indicator of a piece of content that will likely work in AI, will likely work in traditional search.”

Her practical approach: take what’s working on social and test it across other surfaces. A video that performs on TikTok might be worth uploading as a Google Business Profile post. Strong engagement on Instagram might signal a topic worth building out on the website. Content that resonates with real users, wherever they found it, is content worth amplifying.

She also flagged TikTok specifically as one of the most underused research tools in the industry. “A lot of SEOs don’t even want to download the app,” she said, “and there is so much to learn from there; what others also search for—different categories, comments, reviews—all of it.”

Why Celeste Started Building Her Own Tools

The shift that’s made the biggest difference in Celeste’s work isn’t a new platform or a new methodology. It’s the decision to stop waiting for existing tools to provide the data she needed and start building lightweight solutions herself.

Her starting point was a Chrome extension focused on Google Business Profile reviews. The extension pulls in recent review data, runs sentiment analysis, and surfaces content opportunities and recommendations based on what customers are actually saying. No coding background required, the whole thing was built through prompting Claude Code.

“I have a zero code background,” Celeste said. “So my tools that I’ve created are completely vibe coded. It’s a huge learning process, but it was really not that crazy.”

The most valuable application turned out to be competitor analysis. By running the same sentiment tool against competitor GBP listings, Celeste could identify where competitors were falling short in their reviews and position those gaps as her clients’ strengths. 

“Whatever their weaknesses might be, they could be your client’s strengths,” she said. “And that’s something you really want to hit hard and reinforce on the website, reinforce on socials.”

How to Start Without Breaking Everything

The obvious concern with building your own tools is that things go wrong. Celeste is refreshingly direct about this: yes, things will break. That’s part of the process.

Her advice for managing it:

• Build in steps rather than writing everything as one block of code. When something breaks, you’ll know exactly which step caused it.
• Ask Claude Code or your tool of choice to explain each step and why it’s doing it. The understanding you build from that makes troubleshooting faster.
• Keep a knowledge document for whatever you build so you have a starting point when something inevitably goes wrong.
• Watch your API costs. A poorly scoped pull request can generate an unexpected bill.

On where to start: “Think about whatever is the most tedious thing that you wish you could put off your plate, and try to build something that will help with a step in that, not the entire process.” 

Her first collab notebooks simply pulled striking distance keywords from a large dataset and generated bar graphs by subfolder. Nothing groundbreaking, but it saved hours of manual work and gave clients something clear to look at.

Her tool recommendation for beginners: skip Cursor and go straight to Claude Code. “As things have gotten better, Claude Code is even easier. And things are only going to get easier for us to build.”

Creative SEO Requires Client Buy-In, Not Just Creative Ideas

One of the more grounded parts of the conversation was Celeste’s take on how to actually get creative work off the ground inside client relationships. Having good ideas isn’t the hard part. Getting clients to say yes to something unfamiliar is.

Her approach is to earn trust through smaller, lower-risk tests first. Show a client data from a similar experiment done for another client in the same industry, letting them see results before asking them to take a bigger leap. “It’s sort of gauging their risk assessment per person because everyone is completely different when it comes to risk,” she said.

The creative work, the out-of-the-box content angles, custom data integrations, and experimental workflows become possible once that foundation of trust is in place. Trying to skip straight to the interesting stuff before building credibility is how good ideas die in client meetings.

Why In-Person Community Is Having a Moment

Celeste founded the LA SEO Meetup Group out of a simple observation: the online communities that once connected the SEO industry have fragmented. Twitter is gone from its original form. People scattered to LinkedIn, Bluesky, or nowhere. COVID ended most in-person groups. “The sense of community is kind of gone,” Celeste said.

What she’s betting on is that the fragmentation of the digital community, combined with the rise of AI saturating every online channel, is making people actively crave real human interaction. 

“With the rise of AI and kind of having that shoved down our throats on everything possible, we seek human interaction,” she said. “I think local in-person groups are only going to become bigger.”

It’s a pattern showing up beyond the SEO world. Book clubs, run clubs, hobby groups. Gen Z in particular is turning toward in-person activity in ways that would have seemed counterintuitive five years ago. The SEO community is no different. For anyone in the LA area looking to connect with practitioners doing real work, the group is worth showing up for. 

As Celeste puts it: “Even if there’s one person who wants to show up, it’s worth showing up for.”

The SEOs Who Build What They Need Will Outpace the Ones Who Wait

The through-line of everything Celeste shared is a refusal to be passive. The data sources SEOs have relied on are changing. The platforms are fragmenting. The old measurement frameworks are breaking down. Her response isn’t to lament what’s missing. It’s to build what she needs, test what she doesn’t know, and connect with other people doing the same.

“There’s kind of no excuse to not figuring things out at this point,” she said. That’s the mentality that’s going to define who thrives in this next era of search.

Voices of Search is a daily SEO and content marketing podcast hosted by Jordan Keone and Tyson Stockton. The show delivers actionable strategies and data-driven insights to help marketers navigate the ever-evolving world of search engine optimization and content marketing. New episodes air weekly, covering everything from technical SEO to AI discovery, featuring industry leaders and practitioners sharing real-world frameworks and proven tactics.

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