SEO Trends 2025: How to Stay Ahead and Outrank Your Competition

Google has announced major changes to its search algorithms for 2025. With shifting consumer behaviors, traditional SEO tactics may no longer be enough to stay ahead. To dominate search rankings in the coming year, businesses must embrace new strategies, leverage AI-driven insights, and refine their content to meet Google’s latest standards. In this guide, we’ll break down the key SEO trends for 2025 and explore actionable steps to keep you ahead of your competition.

Is SEO even worth investing in?

This is the most common question customers ask each year – is SEO still important, and is it still with investing in? The short answer is – yes! Consumer statistics are the clear proof of that. According to current estimates, Google alone process around 5.6 billion to 8.5 billion searches per day. And that is just one of many search engines that customers are using. Other popular platforms are Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Baidu, and many more. In addition, there are various social media platforms that people search on, and AI Chatbots. With all that being said, there are a lot of opportunities for business owners to master various techniques to dominate search rankings and get those leads. 

New search trends in 2025

As mentioned at the beginning, consumer search methods have changed drastically over the years. Searches are no longer limited to opening search engine and typing keywords you are looking for. What are some of those new trends that are becoming more and more popular?

1. Search by voice – this has become more and more popular way of searching. There are so many devices that are now allowing to search using voice command. You can speak to your phone, computer, devices like Alexa, your iWatch. And that is sometimes so much more convenient than typing on the keyword. You can search for places while driving your car, cooking a meal, or doing other activities. 
2. Search by picture – Google introduced this feature last year, where you can take or upload a picture of something through Google Lens, and it will search for that object for you. It could be someone’s shoes you really liked, or that beautiful top. Google will show you exactly where you can buy it, and for how much. 
3. Social shopping – Customers have option to buy products directly from a social media platform. 
4. Diverse content formats – It is no longer text content that people search for. Videos, podcasts, and images are all now part of what consumers are looking for, when searching. One of the recent updates is that Google can now index podcasts. This is a huge opportunity in the area of AI searches. 

When optimizing your content for SEO, it is no longer optimizing for traditional searches, but you need to optimize for all of the platforms where you can find your potential customer. 

So how do you do this? Let’s dive in.

SEO Best Practices for 2025

1. Keep the basics of SEO

Those basics will always be important, and will help you to optimize your content for various platforms. What are some of those basics? Checkout our step by step guide on how to optimize your website for SEO.

• Submit sitemap to search engines
• Maintain good url structure
• Add title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt tags
• Optimize site speed
• Check for any crawling issuesAuthoritative backlinks

2. Authority backlinks

Authority backlinks are links from well-known and respected websites. Those backlinks are very important, as they help search engines to see your domain is credible. Backlinks have always been a very important ranking signal.

3. Brand authority

Consumer prioritize trusted brands, so building your brand authority is crucial. 

1. Get your website listed in directories, work on getting quality reviews, and create branded content – something that your company came up with, research you conducted, products you designed, etc. 
2. Research which websites are rank high in your specific niche, and try to increase your brand presence there (ex. Consumer guides, YouTube, social forums like Reddit or Quora).
3. Understand the importance of reviews – Google had 3 review-related algorithm updates in 2023. Pages with reviews have more traffic, and they stand out in search results. People may be reluctant to buy products with no reviews, but they eyes will go to well reviewed products. 
4. Invest in Digital PR – boost recognition by engaging journalists, influencers, and bloggers. Promote your message and get it to the right people. Encourage positive brand mentions.
5. Wikipedia page can boost authority and visibility.

4. Quality content

1. Well organized structure  – Create content with clear structure on what your audience is looking for.

• • • Summarize key takeaways
    • Use headings and subheadings
    • Use bullet points and lists
    • Keep sections concise
    • Connect internal links

2. Know your audience – it is crucial. You may have to adjust the content format to appeal to different age groups. Different age groups may engage with content in different ways. 
3. Show your content in variety of ways – Also use various structures of content, like Q&A, FAQs, and How To. This will show that your audience is engaging with your content.
4. Content depth – Pages with poor content can affect the performance of the entire website. Also, make sure you write relevant content. Writing content that is not related to your business can actually hurt you.

• • Short Articles – Human attention span shrank over the years. You can write short articles and still rank well. Value doesn’t require volume. Answer questions simply. For example recipes – adding more content will not help. I want to skip to the recipe part, and not read about bowls, history of ingredients, etc. If someone wants to learn how to tie a tie, they don’t want to read about it, they want to see it. So content is not just a text. 
  • Long Articles – certain subjects still require long form articles, with informative content, and unique details that will set you apart from your competitors. Find a unique angle or find a new topic. There are tools out there that will show you what questions people are asking, and it may give you some ideas to create unique content.

5. Jump on new trends and topics – Monitor platforms like TikTok and Reddit to identify new trends, before they are popular on Google and become super competitive.
6. Create a great user experience – user engagement is part of the ranking system. Include engaging content such as quiz, polls, infographics, etc. The more users are engaged on your page and they spend more time on it, the better for your rankings. Review pages that have high bounce rates, and try to figure out how to improve that content, and keep your users more engaged.

7. Find ways to combine intent & traffic – High traffic keywords are still important, but should be paired with intent-rich queries.

5. Schema Markup

Schema Markup is a code you add to your website that helps search engines better understand your content. It also enhances go your content is shown in search results. 

There are multiple types of markups. Here are some of the more popular ones:

• Product Markup – it includes product image, rating, price, etc. It is a must use for e-commerce websites.
• Review Markup – show your pages with star ratings at the bottom. This makes your page stand out on a long list of results.
• Article Markup – show information about the content, such as title, featured image, author’s name, and publish date. Google will display this markup in a separate section of search results.

6. Invest in Local SEO

Local SEO increases your website visibility in local search results, and helps you to attract local customers. Smaller businesses tent to outperform multi-location companies in local searches. People like to support local businesses, and want that personal touch of small business.

7. Optimize for Voice & Conversational Searches

Focus on using long-tail keywords, incorporating natural, conversation style language. Create content that answers common questions. Some examples of conversational keywords are “how to edit a pdf”, or “how do I edit a pdf”. I like to use Keyword Magic Tool from SemRush, and it shows great ideas for keywords to target in voice searches.

8. Optimize for Visual Search

Use custom images specific to what you offer. Google Lens is being used 10 billion times per month – growing at the rapid pace, so staying ahead now, will help you to master visual search in the future. When uploading images to your website, it is important to use descriptive filenames, alt text, and image titles. Consider how your customers may be searching for your images using Google Lens, and tailor your images accordingly.

9. Attract natural backlinks

Add shareable, and valuable content, such as proprietary studies & data, statistics, infographics, and videos. Make sure to post them on social media as well. Offer different different perspectives that make you stand apart from your competitors.

10. Encourage user-generated content (UGC)

Encourage comments, reviews, forum posts in quotable formats. It shows you have active community, and that you are listening to them.

11. Optimize for Bing

Don’t ignore it. Microsoft if a major investor in OpenAI (who owns ChatGPT). So when you optimize your website for Bing, it helps you optimize for ChatGPT. Apple AI is currently using a lot of ChatGPT data). And Chat GPT may power other big platforms in the future, so again, stay ahead of it now, and it will give you jump start for what’s to come. Here is a good resource to learn more about how Bing SEO differs from optimizing for Google. 

Generative Engine Optimization

GEO is like SEO, but for AI-powered search engines. It combines traditional SEO techniques with insights from generative AI models. So how do you optimize for GEO? Well, there is really nothing special you have to do. Just follow SEO best practices, outlined earlier in this article. Search content is the key – create content that aligns with specific user goals , using long-tail keywords, conversational language, and semantic keywords. And use formatting that AI can easily read and understand. 

SearchGPT Optimization Hacks

• Provide key summary points
• Brand mentions, reviews & online authority
• Optimize for long-tail keywords and conversational phrases
• Leverage user-generated content in quotable form
• Follow technical SEO best practices
• Focus on intent, entity relevance, and engagement
• Craft & refresh in-depth, quality content
• Resist the AI Temptation – people still prefer human content. You can use AI to create layout, etc, It is an unfinished product. 
• Use AI tools to understand who your customers are and what they are searching for. 
• Infuse your content with authority
  • Write in 1^st person
  • Include own experiences
  • Add subject matter expert quotes (collect quotes from experts within your own company)
  • Provide in-depth analysis
  • Leverage social proof
  • Use screenshots to demo process

Summary

We have provided a lot of information in this article, so here is a brief summary of what will help you succeed with SEO in 2025, and outrank your competition:

1. Make sure your website can be found everywhere – where it is traditional Google search, SearchGPT, ChatGPT, social media, directories, etc. 
2. Prepare quality content that will fit all platforms, but also appeal to your specific audience.
3. Constantly monitor new trends, and adapt your content and strategy as needed, and as quickly as you can.

Yes, it sounds easy, but it is a lot of continues work. And that is why you can rely  on OlivSEO to help you to stay on top of these tasks. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, or if you need help with any of the areas discussed in this article.