🎙️ Unscripted SEO Podcast
UX & SEO Merge: Jesse McDonald on Search Experience Optimization
Senior SEO Director at Siege Media on the blurring lines between UX and SEO — and what “search experience optimization” actually means in practice.
In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jesse McDonald, Senior SEO Director at Siege Media. Our wide-ranging conversation covered Jesse’s fascinating journey from graphic design to SEO, the increasingly blurred lines between UX and SEO, and practical approaches to optimization in today’s AI-influenced landscape.
“Téa Phillips: How Entrepreneurs Transform Personal Projects into Thriving Businesses” — passion projects, authentic entrepreneurship, and what it takes to build something sustainable from something personal.
— Téa Phillips | Listen: Téa Phillips on Entrepreneurs & Passion Projects →
Key Takeaways
- UX and SEO are converging into a single discipline. Page experience signals, Core Web Vitals, and user behavior metrics have made it impossible to do good SEO without good UX. The sites that rank best are increasingly the sites that users enjoy using.
- Search experience optimization starts before the click. The title tag, meta description, and SERP presentation are the first UX touchpoint. Jesse’s framework: optimize the SERP experience as carefully as the on-page experience.
- Design background gives SEOs a rare advantage. Understanding visual hierarchy, information architecture, and user attention patterns makes Jesse’s content recommendations fundamentally different from text-only strategists.
- Siege Media’s content model is a replicable template. High-quality, well-designed content that earns links by being genuinely useful — not by being optimized for a specific keyword — is the sustainable play across every algorithm update.
From Graphic Design to SEO
Jesse’s career path is unusual in the SEO world: he started as a graphic designer before discovering that the same visual thinking that makes design work applies directly to content strategy. How does the eye move through a page? What makes a reader stop scrolling? Where does attention go when a page first loads?
Those questions are UX questions and SEO questions simultaneously. The answer to “why do users bounce from this page immediately?” is often visual — the layout is confusing, the hierarchy is unclear, the content doesn’t match the expectation set by the SERP snippet.
What Search Experience Optimization Actually Means
Jesse’s framing: SEO is no longer just about getting to the top of the results — it’s about delivering an experience that justifies being there. A page that ranks #1 but fails the user at every step will lose that position over time. A page that genuinely serves the user’s need will hold it.
The practical checklist: does the page answer the query immediately? Is the layout scannable? Are the next steps clear? Does the mobile experience match the desktop one? These are UX questions with SEO consequences.
Connect with Jesse McDonald
- Company: siegemedia.com
- LinkedIn: Jesse McDonald
The Unscripted SEO Podcast features candid, unscripted conversations with SEOs and digital marketers. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.
