27/04/2026
Baltic-Nordic SEO Summit takeaways from Koray Tugberk GUBUR
🔵 Visual semantics is becoming a core part of SEO
🔵 It’s not just about content anymore - it’s about how text and images come together at the pixel level
🔵 How design and layout influence rankings
🔵 Whether Google uses design to evaluate if you’re a real business
🔵 Whether the order of words matters
🔵 Whether the order of visual elements matters
Adding more text, links, and visuals is not always a good thing.
Document layout directly impacts how content is vectorized.
From patents: before chunking, transformers divide content into structured blocks. Bytes become vectors. Vectors become answers.
When users search for flights, hotels, or cars, Google looks for design patterns - what websites in that category are supposed to look like.
Koray’s process:
Topical map -> Content network and documents -> Mockup design -> Figma design
Some interesting patterns:
📌 In the US, adult sites rank more at night, while rehab sites dominate during the day
📌 If you’re in the wrong category, you won’t rank - more content and links won’t fix it
📌 Secondary domains can be used for narrower topics, leveraging brand relevance to boost sections
🟢 Clicks matter. When your site starts getting clicks, Google runs more algorithms.
🟢 Rank in some queries - and you can rank faster in others.
🟢 An exact-match subdomain with the same content helped recover from the Helpful Content Update.
Visual semantics principles:
1. Visualization
2. Verbalization
3. Content contextualization
4. Commercialization
Commercialization is critical.
If it’s a commercial page, it needs pricing - otherwise it may be downgraded.
The order of words changes relevance.
Sentences should be structured based on the query you’re targeting.
LLMs are not reliable rankers - they can be manipulated and don’t evaluate source credibility.
Google does. If the source isn’t trusted, the answer doesn’t matter.
Visual classification helps Google save resources.
It’s easier to classify a site by layout than to process every token.
Technical insights (GSC data):
📍Response time < 100ms
📍Discovery rate > 20%
📍HTML crawl rate ~99%
HTML normalization = turning images and text into structured data nodes.
Key info like pricing must be above the fold.
Use an exact-match site name (not the same as domain name).
