2024 is racing by. Before you know it, we’ll be into the festive season and then into the glut of articles about digital marketing and SEO trends for 2025.
So this year, why not get ahead of the game? In this article we explore some of the key current trends in SEO that will dominate 2025. Unsurprisingly, many of them are empowered by AI, though the human factor is more important than ever as well, combining an ethical, user-centric approach with the latest technological advances.
Here are five key SEO trends for 2025, and a few tips about how to get ahead of the game:
Zero-click searching
A zero-click search is a search where a user doesn’t click on any of the displayed results. It’s estimated that around 57% of mobile and 25% of desktop searches fall into this category. Users get their answers directly on the SERP, through either:
- Featured Snippets: selected search results shown at the top of Google’s organic results that aim to answer the user’s query immediately;
- Knowledge Panels: information about people, places, organisations etc that appear on the right side of the SERP;
- Local Packs: local business listings including a map, address, and contact details;
- Instant Answers: direct answers for simple queries, for example definitions, calculations, weather.
With one or more of the above features providing the answer to their question, an increasing proportion of users are less likely to click through to the actual website, which can lead to a decline in organic traffic. So it’s important to up your SEO efforts to gain visibility on the first page.
Three things to bear in mind are:
- If you can get to be featured in a snippet or knowledge panel this will significantly increase your brand visibility and authority. Learn more about how to do this in our articles So you want to get into Google’s featured snippets and How can you get into Google’s Knowledge Graph.
- Ensure that you include as much quick and accurate information at every opportunity as this will enhance user trust and engagement with your brand. Answer the questions users will be asking, and adopt a conversational tone where possible. For more ideas check out our article How searching has changed over the past decade.
- Be mindful of the increasing importance of Local SEO. If you have a local business, you will benefit from appearing in Local Packs. Check back here soon for our article that will explain how to do this.
Answer Engine Optimisation
A key element to include in your SEO strategy is AEO – Answer Engine Optimisation. But what is AEO?
AEO can best be thought of as a branch of SEO. Whereas SEO is geared towards improving a website’s search rankings and increasing its organic traffic, AEO aims to answer user queries with direct, concise responses. An answer engine does this through a combination of AI and natural language processing capabilities.
AEO has become necessary because the nature of search queries is evolving. Users are increasingly engaging with search engines more conversationally, often using voice search capabilities. And they expect instant answers to these conversational queries.
There are two main categories of answer engines : Generative AI bots and AI-powered voice search assistants:
- Generative AI bots – for example ChatGPT and Bard – use advanced AI algorithms to deliver detailed answers to a wide range of queries.
- AI-powered voice search assistants – for example Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant – use voice recognition technology to respond to spoken queries.
To take advantage of AEO, it pays to research the kind of questions related to your product or service that are being asked of AI bots and voice assistants. Then make sure that your website and other digital content are answering those questions.
Make sure that you also intersperse your answers to questions with your brand’s identity and personality, so that you stand out from the crowd. This ensures that users don’t just get an answer to their initial search query but also get a sense of who you are and feel motivated to engage with you.
Experience matters
But there are other key trends that do not rely on AI. Whilst there are an increasing number of AI tools such as ChatGPT that can generate content, Google is continuing to emphasise the quality of that content, and particularly the experience of those creating the content.
In December 2022, Google began to include Experience in its guidelines for determining the quality of content. So what used to be E-A-T – Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – became E-E-A-T – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Whilst E-E-A-T has never been confirmed as a direct factor in Google’s ranking formula, it certainly helps your content to perform well and to fit with Google’s definition of a good search result. Three things that are important here are:
- First-hand experience with the subject matter, to be able to provide tried-and-tested advice, examples and case studies;
- Proven and recognised knowledge and expertise about the subject, to add confidence and trust in the content;
- Topical authority on a particular aspect of the subject. Even if this is niche, it can gain you a reputation as a reliable source. This can be reinforced by backlinks to your site from other sites;
Content has a reduced shelf-life
Content velocity is a useful metric to add to your monitoring. It refers to the amount of content pieces you have produced during a given time, and can be used to measure how the amount of content impacts your SEO results.
Content velocity is typically particularly high on video platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. YouTube has 720,000 hours of new videos uploaded every single day, and TikTok 34 million videos posted each day. Whilst those may be extreme examples, it does mean that in general the shelf-life of content is diminishing, and what is relevant can change overnight.
In order to keep up with this, it’s critical that your content is regularly refreshed and updated. Not just in terms of ensuring the veracity of facts and figures, but also making sure that content aligns with user intent and reflects SEO best practice.
So content creation should never be seen as a one-off process. Updating your content regularly demonstrates to users and to search engines that your website is active and well-maintained, and should result in increased organic website traffic.
Updating content should be viewed as an ongoing process, rather than something that happens every few months or so. And whilst items that feature facts and figures may need to be updated more often, don’t neglect pages with ‘evergreen content. All content should be regularly audited to identify potential updates and changes. Some of these may be small changes to text or links, but others may be larger rewrites, designed to fit better with current search intent.
Content refreshes can lead to more visibility in search engines, which should hopefully attract new visitors to your site and also continue to engage existing users by giving them current and relevant information. It also ensures that you are competing effectively with other, perhaps newer, material on the same topic.
Video SEO
We referred earlier to the volume of content being posted daily on YouTube and TikTok. There seems to be an unlimited capacity for video content, with the number of digital video viewers worldwide currently over 3.3 billion.
According to Hubspot’s annual State of Video Marketing survey, 89% of consumers confirm they want to see more videos from brands, and 75% of viewers watch short-form video content on their mobile devices. People are also 52% more likely to share video content on their own social media than any other type of content.
So video SEO – VSEO – also needs to be a key aspect of your SEO strategy. Search engines are increasingly making video content more accessible to searchers. For example, not only is there a Videos tab in Google, but videos are now often visible on the first page of SERPs. Also bear in mind that YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world so its potential should never be overlooked.
VSEO is the way to get your videos in front of more people through both search engines and social media. But how do you optimise a video for VSEO? This is a topic that we will return to in more detail in a future article, but a few pointers to get you started are:
- Make your video purposeful, not just “nice”;
- Ensure your video provides value to your target audience;
- Optimise your video title, description and transcript for searcher intent;
- Create a stand-out video thumbnail;
- Include a solid call to action at the end. Many videos result in conversions.
And finally, make wise decisions on the best video hosting platform for your needs. There are some advantages to hosting it on your own website, such as exclusive access, complete control over the appearance, and no distractions such as ads or continuation videos. However, self-hosting can also slow down the loading of your website and there is the risk of compatibility issues such as your video not displaying correctly on certain browsers, especially mobile browsers.
So in many ways it could be better to use a third party host such as YouTube, which is designed for streaming and therefore has the best settings for playback and speed. A good strategy is to host your video on YouTube and embed it into your website. This will ensure that visitors view the specific video you want them to, and also that it is optimised for most devices and browsers they are likely to be using.
We hope that the above information is a useful pointer on some of the key trends in SEO that will be significant during 2025. Even with the increasing influence and enabling of AI, fundamental SEO principles will continue to be essential to achieving visibility in search engine results and driving organic traffic and business growth.
Keep checking back here with us at Xcite Digital, as we navigate the changing SEO landscape together during 2025 and beyond.