SEO trends 2025

SEO Trends 2025

Source: searchengineland.com

2024 has already brought many changes to SEO, and 2025 promises to be even more intense. The challenges ahead lie in reconciling innovation and authenticity as well as automation and human empathy.

The Google antitrust proceedings,
new, alternative search engines

The antitrust proceedings against Google could bring about major changes in the SEO landscape if Google is forced to share its data with other providers:

  1. This would allow competitors to develop their own search engines more quickly and diversify the organic search landscape. SEOs would then have to adapt to several search providers and their search offerings.
  2. This disclosure could also provide deep insights into Google’s algorithms, allowing for more targeted adjustments, but could also encourage manipulation – a return to older, questionable SEO tactics.
  3. In addition, searches are already changing thanks to AI tools such as ChatGPT.

AI assistants – benefits and dangers

AI tools offer SEOs many opportunities to increase efficiency, but also entail significant risks:

  1. The multitude of tools can lead to standardization, which makes creativity and differentiation difficult. If everyone uses the same tools on the same data, the results become interchangeable, which reinforces Google’s evaluation focus on “E-E-A-T” (experience, expertise, authority, trust).
  2. Many AI tools are like a “black box”, it often remains unclear how the results are obtained; doubts about their reliability are justified.
  3. Over-reliance on AI can weaken critical thinking. Real SEO expertise will be based on your own SEO experience and creative SEO solutions, AI cannot replace these skills so far.

E-E-A-T – Originality is crucial

E-E-A-T will remain central to SEO success in 2025:

  1. To stand out, brands need to focus on originality and use their own data and experience. One indication of this is the leaked Google document with an “original content” rating system. Customer reviews, in-house research and internal analysis of customer behaviour – such as support transcripts and product usage data – are becoming valuable resources for optimizing content.
  2. The importance of demonstrable expertise continues to grow, and real author biographies contribute to credibility. Creating authentic and human content builds trust with users and search engines. Now would be the ideal time to update author biographies, for example.

User experience instead of keyword focus

In 2025, it will be crucial for SEO success to focus content more on the needs of users than just on keywords:

  1. Instead of focusing solely on keywords, SEOs should design content around users’ problems and questions. High search volume keywords can often be misleading as they are usually dominated by user-generated content (UGC, such as posts on Reddit or Quora) or list and review sites that Google favors.
  2. Users today search more often with long, specific questions rather than short phrases. Developing content that specifically addresses users’ concerns and challenges will save you time and avoid competing for difficult keywords. Search engines reward content that emphasizes the user experience and provides clear, helpful answers.

Technical SEO is becoming increasingly important

Technical SEO means optimizing your website so that search engine bots can easily crawl and understand it – this includes structured data, an organized sitemap, internal links and clean code.

Accessibility is also important, as user-friendly, accessible pages improve the user experience and have a positive effect on rankings. The latest Google leak also shows that Google takes clicks and user behavior after the click into account in the ranking.

Page speed and the Core Web Vitals influence the ranking on mobile devices in particular, slow or poorly optimized pages could be at a disadvantage.

Platforms with heavy use of JavaScript need to ensure that their content is rendered and indexed correctly.

Carl D. Erling, Berlin, CTO
Carl D. Erling, CTO