SEO is Changing: Trends for 2025

How we do business is changing faster than ever.

With the rise of remote work, increased digital engagement, and the constant changes in consumer expectations, businesses must find innovative ways to stand out. With eCommerce alone, over 27 million websites have been reported globally since 2024.

This is why I believe SEO is no longer optional in an increasingly competitive market; it’s necessary.

As the internet gets more crowded, SEO provides companies with the ability to:

• Make your brand more visible to potential customers with higher search rankings.
• Drive more organic traffic to your website from search engines and chatbots like ChatGPT, SearchGPT, and Google Gemini.
• Boosts your brand credibility and trust while keeping ahead of changing consumer behavior.

People conduct roughly 8.5 billion searches daily on Google. If you want to maximize your digital marketing strategy and succeed in today’s marketplace, it helps to know what SEO trends look like in 2025.

Your Business Needs Quality SEO

Thinking back to the COVID pandemic, millions of consumers were pushed online to do business and make purchases. E-commerce sales increased by 43% in 2020. It was extremely important for businesses to be visible and reach their customers in moments that mattered.

In today’s market, the demand for visibility has not changed but only evolved. SEO has become increasingly important with the emergence of AI-driven search tools like Google Gemini, SearchGPT, and Bing AI. Businesses must adapt.

SEO drives higher visibility, which is crucial for online success. SEO strengthens your brand’s positioning across multiple marketing channels and touchpoints—making it more important now than ever.

13 SEO Trends to Follow in 2025

The desires and expectations of consumers are constantly changing. Search engine algorithms are ever-evolving.

Here are thirteen SEO trends every small business should know in 2025.

1. AI-Driven Search Experiences

The rise of AI tools like Google Gemini and SearchGPT is reshaping how users search and how search results are generated. AI Overviews summarize content from multiple sources and is becoming a dominant feature in search results. The results offer a more interactive and conversational experience for the end user. While only 7% of search queries trigger an AI Overview on Google, statistics show that AI has a growing influence in search.

Recent studies state that 50% to 85% of the sources cited in Google’s AI Overviews appear within the top 10 organic search results, highlighting the importance of ranking high in organic results to be included in these AI summaries​.

To stay abreast of the trending use of AI, businesses must adapt their SEO strategies to:

• Tailor content to be easily summarized in AI Overviews, ensuring key points are clear and concise.
• Focus on structured data (e.g., schema markup) to improve visibility and help AI systems understand your content more effectively.
• Optimize for conversational and long-tail keywords, as users increasingly turn to natural language queries when interacting with AI-powered search tools.

By aligning content with these strategies, businesses can better meet evolving search behaviors and improve their rankings in AI-powered search results.

2. Privacy-Focused SEO Strategies

Users have become more sensitive about how websites handle their data. As a result, search engines are focusing more on user privacy regulations. Businesses increasingly rely on first-party data—such as customer subscriptions and email marketing—rather than third-party cookies. Businesses need to comply with privacy laws by aligning regulations with consumer expectations.

To align with privacy-focused SEO strategies, consider the following approaches:

• Server-side tagging: Use this method to comply with data privacy laws, as it allows businesses to collect data securely and with user consent​
• Contextual advertising: Avoid invasive tracking methods and respect user privacy by replacing traditional, user-specific data tracking with contextual ads that focus on the content surrounding a user rather than their personal information​.
• Transparency is key. Ensure your website clearly communicates how data is collected and used, fostering trust with your audience and helping you build stronger, longer-lasting customer relationships.
• Focus on content quality and relevance. Create high-quality, relevant content that aligns with user intent. This approach naturally attracts and engages audiences and can reduce reliance on personal data for targeting.

3. Content Freshness and Updates

Back in March, the Google Search document leak shed light on how search engines evaluate content freshness. Google uses specific attributes to assess the recency of content.

This confirms why updating your content is vital for maintaining strong SEO rankings. Google’s ranking algorithms prioritize fresh, relevant information, ensuring users receive the most accurate and timely answers.

Fresh content also aligns with the needs of AI-driven search systems, which value timeliness and relevance. Outdated information can hurt both your rankings and credibility, while refreshed content signals to search engines that your site remains an authoritative resource.

A Few Tips for Keeping Content Updated

To ensure your content stays competitive, follow these best practices:

• Rework existing articles: Review older blog posts, landing pages, and FAQs to update them with current information, trends, and user-focused optimizations.
• Add new insights: Include updated examples, case studies, or actionable advice to enhance engagement and authority.
• Revise for new search intent: Adapt your content to reflect changing user behaviors, focusing on emerging keywords and conversational queries that align with modern search trends.

Consistently updating your content helps maintain or improve your rankings but also helps enhance user trust, ensuring your site remains the go-to resource for relevant, authoritative, and meaningful information.

4. Prioritize Middle-of-the-Funnel Content

The customer journey can be broken down into three key stages:

• Top of the Funnel (Awareness): Content at this stage aims to educate and attract potential customers, such as blog posts, social media content, and introductory guides.
• Middle of the Funnel (Consideration): This stage focuses on nurturing leads with more detailed and valuable information to help them evaluate their options.
• Bottom of the Funnel (Decision): Content here encourages action, including free trials and direct calls to purchase or engage.

Users transition from general awareness to active consideration in the middle of the funnel. At this stage, prospects seek content that provides deeper insights into solutions demonstrating your authority and value. If you aim to attract middle-of-the-funnel users (MOFU), you must share detailed content showcasing how your product or service directly solves prospects’ pain points.

A few examples of middle-of-the-funnel content include:

• Success Stories and Case Studies: Share real-world examples of how your product or service solves problems or delivers measurable results. These scenarios, backed by data or customer quotes, can be powerful tools for convincing hesitant prospects.
• Comparison Reports: Help prospects make informed decisions by highlighting your offerings’ strengths versus competitors and addressing common questions or doubts.
• Tools and Demos: Resources like calculators and product demos allow your audience to explore your solutions hands-on, building confidence in their decisions.
• Lead Magnets: Offer downloadable guides, checklists, or templates that provide immediate value while capturing user information for future follow-ups.

Middle-of-the-funnel content acts as a bridge, turning curiosity into intent. By addressing user needs with tailored, engaging, and interactive resources, you can inspire trust and guide prospects toward the final stages of their decision-making journey.

5. Visual and Multimodal SEO

Multimodal SEO is the practice of optimizing multiple content types—text, images, videos, and audio—to improve your brand’s visibility and engagement across search engines. As search engines become more advanced, particularly with the integration of AI, they prioritize delivering diverse forms of content to match user preferences and queries.

This means that traditional text-based SEO alone is no longer sufficient. An advanced multimodal SEO marketing strategy prioritizes various content modalities that extend beyond text-based content. Here are just a few ways to apply this:

• Content Diversity: Optimizing multiple formats ensures your content is accessible and engaging, whether users prefer reading, watching, or listening.
• Visual Search: Tools like Google Lens allow users to search using images, making image optimization a key component of multimodal SEO.
• Voice and Audio Search: As voice search grows in popularity (with approximately 162.7 million Americans anticipated to use voice assistants by 2027), optimizing for audio content like podcasts and voice-friendly answers is becoming a critical SEO strategy.
• Video SEO: Short-form platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts emphasize the importance of optimizing key elements such as captions, metadata, and visually engaging thumbnails to maximize reach and engagement.

By adopting multimodal SEO, businesses can meet users where they are in their search journey. Whether a user types a query, uses visual search tools, or interacts with video content, multimodal SEO makes it easier for users to find what they want across multiple devices and platforms.

6. Stay Flexible with a Cross-Channel SEO Strategies

To maximize the potential of multimodal content, it’s essential to think beyond individual platforms. A cross-channel strategy allows you to integrate and repurpose content across different platforms, ensuring broader reach and consistent messaging. Some examples of Cross-Channel SEO include:

• A short-form video optimized for TikTok can be adapted for YouTube shorts or transformed into an engaging visual carousel for LinkedIn.
• An image optimized for Google Lens can complement a blog post, making it sharable on platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.
• Content from a long-form blog article can be repurposed and communicated through a short video highlighting its key points and takeaways.

The good news? Adopting cross-channel integration isn’t as daunting as it sounds. Simply:

• Embrace Diverse Platforms: Include TikTok, LinkedIn, Youtube Shorts, and Bing AI in your SEO efforts. Each platform offers unique opportunities to reach specific segments of your audience.
• Leverage Emerging Tools: Experiment with new AI-driven features on platforms like Bing to optimize for platform-specific search capabilities.

Staying agile in your SEO approach allows you to adapt to shifting user behaviors and emerging tools and ensures your brand appears consistent and relevant in your digital marketing efforts.

7. Optimize for Zero-Click Searches and Featured Snippets

Zero-click searches occur when a search engine provides an answer directly on the search results page (think AI Overviews), eliminating the need for the user to click through to a website. These searches are becoming increasingly common, as Google and other search engines aim to provide users with quick answers directly on the SERPs through features like Featured Snippets, FAQs, and People Also Ask (PAA) sections.

While it may seem impossible to get featured among these snippets, optimizing for them can still bring valuable visibility and traffic to your website, and with the rise of AI-driven search tools like Google Gemini and SearchGPT from Bing, it’s crucial to adapt your strategy to ensure your content is optimized for these new search formats.

Here are a few tips to help you out:

• Create Clear, Concise Answers: Structure your content to address common user queries directly. Use bullet points, numbered lists, or concise paragraphs to make it easy for search engines to pull content for Featured Snippets and PAA sections.
• Target Common Questions: Focus on answering frequently asked questions related to your industry. This helps position your content for inclusion in the PAA box, where users look for additional, related information.
• Use Schema Markup and Structured Data: Implement schema markup to help search engines better understand your content. This makes it easier for AI tools and search engines to identify and feature your content in zero-click searches, rich snippets, or AI-generated summaries.
• Provide Authoritative, Well-Organized Content: Ensure your content is authoritative and well-organized, increasing the likelihood of being featured in AI-generated summaries or zero-click results.

By optimizing your content with these tips, you can improve your chances of securing top visibility on SERPs and engaging users with immediate, valuable answers.

8. SEO Focused on Search Intent

SEO gives businesses a platform to communicate relevant and meaningful information to their target market by developing content that resonates with users and search engines alike. To succeed at organic SEO, you must:

• Know your target audience and understand their motivators.
• Conduct in-depth keyword research.
• Study your competitors.
• Develop a content strategy with informative material that addresses the needs of your target audience.

Once these foundational elements are in place, refining your approach by focusing on user intent is crucial. Focusing SEO keywords on search intent means selecting and optimizing keywords based on the reason or motivation behind a user’s search query. Understanding search intent helps ensure your content aligns with what users want or need in their prospective journey with your brand.

This means:

• Identify the user intent behind search queries (informational, commercial, transactional, navigational) to guide your content creation. Recognize whether users aim to seek information, are trying to reach a specific page, seek bargains, or wish to make a purchase.
• Filter and optimize keywords based on intent. Align your keyword research with the searcher’s needs to address the right questions at the right time in their buying journey.
• Choose the appropriate content format (e.g., blog posts, videos, case studies) that best matches the user’s intent and where they are in their journey.
• Create a unique call to action that aligns with the user’s search intent.

With this approach, your SEO helps position your brand in the right place at the right time and meet the needs of your audience.

9. Local SEO

Local SEO focuses on optimizing your online presence to attract geo-targeted traffic, primarily from people in your area. This is an ideal digital marketing strategy for businesses looking to increase traffic, leads, and brand awareness from local searches.

Local SEO takes advantage of mobile users who are searching for businesses in their area. These users are often actively looking for solutions to immediate needs, making them more likely to convert into customers.

You need to understand how Google’s local algorithms work to establish a strong local presence. Local algorithms are based on three primary signals:

1. Relevance
2. Proximity
3. Prominence

To optimize your local SEO, make sure your business appears relevant and prominent within its geographic area. This involves creating and maintaining your Google Business Profile (GBP)​.

To get started with creating a profile, claim your Google Business Profile (GBP). Make sure your profile includes key business details such as:

• Business name
• Store hours
• Address
• Phone number (NAP consistency)

Maintaining consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) across all online platforms is critical for local SEO. This ensures that search engines correctly associate your business with its physical location, improving its relevance and prominence in local search results​.

Dominate Local SEO Competition With These 4 Tips

1. Claim and Update All Listings: Ensure your business is listed on Bing, Facebook, Yelp, Apple, and other platforms. Keep NAP consistency across all of them.
2. Publish Regular Content in GBP: Post updates such as product promotions, events, and special offers to enhance your visibility.
3. Maintain Your Media Library: Regularly upload high-quality photos representing your products, services, and company culture to keep your profile engaging.
4. Build and Manage Reviews: Encourage customers to leave reviews and be responsive—especially to negative ones—as this shows you value feedback and strengthens your brand’s reputation.

10. Don’t Forget to E-E-A-T

Google’s E-E-A-T framework sets higher standards for content quality, especially in a world increasingly saturated with AI-generated material. To determine whether online content delivers value to its readers, Google’s Search Quality evaluators assess four main focal points of online material:

• Experience: Does the content creator have first-hand or life experience with the subject?
• Expertise: Is the writer knowledgeable about the topic?
• Authoritativeness: is the writer an authority in their field? Is the content commanding?
• Trustworthiness: is the writer and information reliable, accurate, and convincing?

While Google E-E-A-T isn’t necessarily a ranking factor, it does influence a website’s standing in search results. By providing companies with guidelines for producing quality content, Google reveals what it considers important in its ranking process.

Google E-E-A-T also helps businesses combat the growing problem of misinformation in AI content. Although AI-generated content is rapidly increasing, it is often poorly written and lacks authority. The E-E-A-T framework makes it easier for Google to determine whether AI-generated material is of good quality, trustworthy, and relevant to searchers.

So, while AI tools can help you generate content more quickly, you want to ensure that you infuse your content with quality, expertise, experience, and authority.

It’s easier than you think. Instead of trusting AI generative tools to do ALL the work for you, make sure to follow these best practices:

• Be Human: Personalize your content and share stories – naturally. Let your personality flow into what you’re communicating.
• Leverage First-Hand Experience: Share success stories, case studies, or examples from real-world expertise to enhance credibility.
• Focus on Author Profiles: Use detailed author bios to highlight qualifications, credentials, and hands-on experience.
• Ensure Factual Accuracy: Fact-check all data, provide citations, and link to authoritative sources. Avoid unverified claims.
• Prioritize Transparency: Clearly state the purpose and sources of your content and provide disclosures about the role of AI if applicable.
• Build Authoritative Backlinks: Collaborate with respected industry sources to strengthen your content’s authority and trust signals​.

Keeping E-E-A-T in mind will ensure your content delivers reliable, meaningful value to users while addressing concerns over misinformation.

11. Core Web Vitals and User Experience

80% of people with a negative user experience are less likely to return to a company’s website​.

User experience is a top priority for consumers, and page experience is crucial to SEO success. Core Web Vitals ensures users enjoy a smooth, fast, and efficient browsing experience, directly impacting search rankings.

As you assess the page experience your site provides, consider the following vitals:

• First Input Delay (FID): The time it takes for a web page to respond to user interaction.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): The visual stability of a page as it loads, ensuring elements don’t unexpectedly shift around.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The time it takes from a user’s click to when they can see most content on-screen.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures how quickly the page responds to user interactions, improving your website’s overall interactivity and engagement​.

Technical SEO improves your website’s performance, minimizes user frustrations, reduces pain points, and helps deliver a positive experience. Since Google loves a well-performing website, Core Web Vitals boosts your SEO rankings and positively impacts your bottom line.

12. Leverage Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO

When people think of search engines, Google is usually the first company that comes to mind. However, Bing handles around 12 billion global search requests monthly and shouldn’t be overlooked as a valuable SEO opportunity. Bing continues developing its product, recently collaborating with OpenAI to produce SearchGPT.

A free Microsoft tool, Bing Webmaster, helps businesses add their websites to Bing’s index to ensure they can appear on Bing Search and gain more organic traffic. Bing Webmaster offers a suite of tools that helps track performance and identify areas for optimization improvement. These tools include:

• Keyword research: find new words or phrases that searchers use to find sites like yours.
• Backlinks: identify sites that are linking back to yours.
• Site scan: locate any technical issues on your website that could impede SEO results.
• SEO reports: pinpoint errors quickly with a prioritized list of issues to resolve.

With Bing Webmaster, you can manage your content easily and effectively. Take advantage of this tool and:

• Remove pages you don’t want to be included in search engines’ index.
• Monitor your website’s performance and manage potential security issues.
• Submit your own content to be crawled and see how Bing indexes your site.

With total transparency, Bing lets you see what you need to do to improve optimization efforts and boost your rankings.

13. Authentic Backlinks Still Matter

Link building remains a crucial component of SEO, even with the advent of AI-generated summaries like Google’s AI Overviews. These overviews synthesize information from various sources, often including links to the original content.

High-quality backlinks continue to signal a website’s authority and relevance, influencing its inclusion in these AI-generated summaries. Therefore, a robust link-building strategy enhances traditional search rankings and increases the likelihood of being featured in AI overviews.

To build authentic backlinks, you should:

• Build authentic relationships with online publications that provide opportunities to contribute content.
• Watch for companies or individuals who mention your brand online.
• Rework your current content strategy to include shareable lists, in-depth guides, videos, and infographics.
• Create guest posts on market-relevant sites.
• Post links on social media to reach an audience that could benefit your site.

These are just a few of the numerous ways to maximize backlinks in your SEO strategy.

Hire an Expert Austin SEO Company

At this point, you may be feeling overwhelmed.  We understand.  Most small business owners want to invest their best energy in what they do best, which is typically not SEO.

We can help. 

As your trusted digital marketing partner in Austin and Milwaukee, we create beautiful, responsive websites that look great and perform well in search rankings. Our marketing experts ensure that your content is optimized for users and search engines while our digital strategies drive meaningful traffic to your site.

If you need guidance in building your online presence, reach out today for a free 30-minute consultation. Let us help you achieve your goals.