SEO Trends, Predictions & Tips for 2025

SEO trends, predictions, and tips. What should we be doing in SEO to win in 2025? It has been quite a crazy year in SEO. I think that I have a hard time thinking of even a craziest time to be doing SEO with all of the updates, leaks in our sector that might or might not be changing a lot on what we do, right? And to make some actionable, meaningful, impactful predictions And provide tips for you to prepare for the new year. I have invited today some of the most well-experienced SEOs I know from the industry that I trust myself in order to share tips with all of you and their thoughts about where we are going, what should we do, how we should get ready to continue succeeding, hopefully in the new year. So very, very quickly, I want to introduce Our today's guests in this edition of Crawling Mondays. Lily Ray, VP of SEO and Research in Amziep Digital. Hello, Lily. How are you?

Hi, I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.

Thank you for joining. Nick Leroy is an independent SEO consultant and founder of seojobs.com. Hello, Nick.

Hello. Thanks so much for having me.

Hello.

Hello. Mordy, Mordy Oversine, he is One of the SEO leaders in Wix and also the brand SEO consultant. Hello, Mordy.

Hello.

Garrett Sussman. Garrett is the director of marketing at iPullRank. Hello, Garrett. Thank you very much for joining.

Hi.

Nitin Mashanda. He's an SEO consultant and founder at Bookpresso. Hello, Nitin.

Hey, Aleyda.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for coming. Cindy Krumm. She's the CEO of Mobile Moxie.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for coming. Miracle Inameti Archivan. Miracle is the head of search at John Lewis. Hello. Hello, Miracle. Thank you very much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

To start already, I will go through the results of the SEO FOMO community top SEO predictions and tips for 2025 survey that I did. And I got more than 100 survey answers, pretty much summarizing what are the feelings of the community out there. And we are going to go through them, sharing our thoughts, tips, and predictions, starting with the most prominent ones, the ones that had more weight. AI-driven and generative search was the first one. AI-powered overviews and answering engines will become more prevalent, extending beyond just informational queries into more transactional and commercial searches. We have also zero-click and on SERP experiences. Google and other search engines will continue introducing SERP features that reduce the need for users to click through to external websites. So traffic erosion that we have already seen that will tend to become even more common, diminishing traditional organic search click-through rates. Brand authority and topical relevance was another very big topic here. Strong, recognizable brands that maintain topical focus and authority in their niche will have a competitive edge. It's becoming more evident than ever that is critical. And the same with the content alignment, say expertise and authority that our brand has. Entity-based strategies where authority, trust, and authenticity will become prime as a signal. Shifts in content strategy and quality standards here was another very well-mentioned prediction. Mass-produced, low-quality AI-generated content is expected to face penalties even if they say they At the end of the day, it's about quality and an emphasis on real experience and expertise. And finally, as a top one, what should we start doing to cover our backs a little bit by diversifying, right? It is becoming very evident now with SearchGPT, other platforms that are now more and more used for content discovery like TikTok. What are your thoughts on this? Do you expect things to change along these lines? What is the weight that you will give to this different type of trends that have been shared in the predictions?

So I have a thought that kind of is hinted at in all of these predictions, but doesn't, isn't really addressed head on. And this may be controversial. That's what I like anyway. I think there is going to be an increased focus in AI overviews and brands and in stuff like that. And especially small companies that don't have big brands do need to diversify in their traffic sources. But I also— what I'm looking at a lot is the cost of generating those AI overviews and where that's coming from. And I think that if Google manages to monetize AI overviews, which they've said they plan on, they've announced it, you know, they want to put PPC in there, if they do a good job of monetizing that, I think that they could end up putting less compute power into the blue links below the AI overviews and not do as great a job of finding the best results if they think they've found the best results and summarized it before. And building on that, I think that the things that Google is going to need are the things that are new and changing or time-sensitive, like e-commerce and news. But things that are known, like I talked about this as a zombie, like creating zombie sites, like Once Google has extracted all the value from all of your blue links, why do they need them? And why would they keep evaluating them? And so this is kind of an existential question, and that may be deeper than what we wanted to do this early in the morning, but that's what I'm thinking about.

To Cindy's point, one thing we learned in 2024 is we can't live off of our assumptions about Google. To take a page from Cindy, historically, we've always wanted to look at what What's, where's the money, right? Like where's the ad revenue? However, a lot of the AI overview stuff feels counterintuitive because they're potentially cannibalizing their own ads. And as a result, we've still seen them try to like roll out these AI organized search results, which doesn't seem to benefit like Google in the long run. And then we're seeing recently with the site reputation abuse manual penalties, big brands getting penalized. We've all talked about Forbes and how, you know, they're infallible. They're never going to get knocked off the perch. And yet that seems to be happening. So what I'm looking for in 2025 is just seeing this AI, they're going all in. We didn't expect them to, you know, show AI overviews for your money, your life types of results as well. And we're seeing that across the board, like to some extent on health and finance more than anywhere else. So I think whatever you're seeing people say, it can't be this or it has to be that. I don't think anyone can say anything with certainty going forward.

There's no logic here. So like, it's not just Google, companies across the, the, the border doing this. They're making immediate decisions for the stock price without thinking long-term. So then they become unpredictable, right? So what Google's doing now with AI overviews makes, if you think about it, like not a lot of sense. There's not, from a, from a pure product point of view, if I was a product manager, is there a lot of product distinction between this and a featured snippet? No. Are they, is this where they end up going with it? Or is, is this what people really fundamentally want? I don't know. I think I have a lot of doubt that this is what people fundamentally want. out of a search engine, but for the immediate stock price that Google's gonna go for, because that's how all these companies are thinking. So you're, you're to your and Cindy's point, it does leave the whole ecosystem completely unpredictable because they're not acting logically. And I don't know how you act in a, in a situation where the ecosystem isn't functioning logically anymore.

I think they are acting logically. They're protecting their market share and they're being a loss leader to say like, we own this. don't encroach on our space, don't even try, right? Like if they had just said, oh well, we give up, like that would be a horrible business move.

Cindy, you're right. They are acting, I believe indeed logically based on the context that they are, but they are reactive. They have skin in the game, unlike ChatGPT at the end of the day. So they need to show that they are doing something about it. So that is why we have seen the release of AI overviews going very little by little, only informational queries, not Not only the money queries that they actually care about. And they are doing more and more changes to the SERPs, becoming zero clicks for pages that are the middlemen, let's say. So PLPs for e-commerce. Have you seen the experience that they launched for Black Friday? I have never seen something like that. Literally linking from the homepage and with the sidebar, with a top navigation carousel, with the product packs above the fold. So I believe what is taking most of our attention is this, but for a lot of the money-making queries, product-related queries, they are already releasing a lot of other features that might or might not necessarily leverage AI overviews per se, but they are certainly leveraging the product knowledge graph and AI features that they have, and they are blending them in a way that connect with the user's purchasing journey and so on. A lot of the attention is going to this because they need to show that they are doing something as a reaction to ChatGPT, but the money queries and a lot of the experience that they want to provide in order to become more of like an alternative to Amazon, for example, alternative to many of the other type of players are there where users are going. They are doing it in different ways. So for example, the integration of Reddit, of user-generated content, whether we like it or not, or the way that they are doing it, and not necessarily with the quality that we expected, they are trying to, again, react. to the market of the users saying that they are going to TikTok and Instagram and other platforms to find things. And this is how they are reacting. So I think that there's much more than just the generative search integration within AI overviews, but a lot of other features that they are trying to implement to keep up with all of these newcomers that they have now as competitors that they didn't 3 years ago, 4 years ago.

I think the zero-click search phenomenon shows that people like AI overviews and features and stuff like that. And I wonder if we need to start rethinking about how Google sees a search result. Like, is a blue link a fail, right? Is a blue link like something where they should have gotten it into a feature or they should have gotten it into some kind of carousel because that's what people seem to like? And we're still banging our head against the wall trying to get blue links when Google doesn't want to show blue links. They want to show overviews and features and expanders and knowledge graph and anything that Like they think zero-click is good, right?

I think one thing that is really interesting, Aleyda, because you said you brought like a diversity of people, we should have brought like someone who's just like a normal consumer because I think like consumers are really, they're so lazy. Even me, my attention span is so terrible. Like the consumer is really, the consumer, the average consumer feels everything is, you know, everything is over-engineered, everything. And so if I can get Google to make the decision for me, Why will I need to click? You know, they, they're trusting that Google has evaluated all of these results and has given me this. Why would I need to, to go into the SERP? And it's that thing that is leading this zero-click. Like, we're all— we're as SEOs, we're like, oh, we want people to click and go. But I think Google will pursue the real user who's thinking, well, Google has made the decision for me. That's why we can see the trend towards Reddit and social, because people are tired of like reading this long blog post that they know has been curated and cast crafted and over-engineered. They just want a real person to do the work for them and say, this is the best result. And for the consumer, they're thinking, this is the best result. So we're just going to go with it. We've seen that as well in like PPC when it comes to like manual bidding and PMax and all of that. Like you try, you're like, well, I can, I have this, you know, different data points and I can optimize, but then you just realize, oh well, if I just put it all in PMax, it just works better. So why would I? And I think that's where the, that's how the user sees it. And that's why Google will just continue investing in this. I think the key thing is how they monetize it and what impact that would have on the SERPs.

Yeah, there's one thing interesting as far as like the trajectory of AI overviews in the last year, something that kind of contradicts a little bit of what we're talking about, which is that Google keeps finding new ways to incorporate more links in the answers in AI overviews. So if you remember when it started with SGE, it was like 3 to 6 thumbnail links in a carousel that was like, in my opinion, not very accessible to the user. And then like a very large block of text that didn't have a lot of other links in it. Since then, they've added those little, you know, link citations to almost every bullet point in the answer. And then in like the last month, they've added inline, or they're testing inline links as well. So to your point, Cindy, like maybe it's the blue links below it, maybe Google feels are not the future, but like integrating a lot more citations within the AI reviews could be a way to kind of get the best of both worlds. And one other thing that I'll add that I think is really interesting about this year is how we mentioned before Google's being super reactive. They've been reactive in many different ways. So if, if the public, like if the press or if the SEO industry makes a really big stink out of something, and I mean, one example is not necessarily the SEO industry, but like everybody's saying they add Reddit to their searches, you know, like that had clearly like a fundamental change in how Google ranks results. But also just like the helpful content updates, site reputation abuse, like a lot of these conversations were things that were happening within the SEO space, within publishing space, and Google was very reactionary to those as well.

You brought a really good point, Lily, regarding AI overuse, which reminds me of something very important. It's true that Google has integrated more and more, little by little, links out there, which actually connects well with— it's because of course they need to showcase that they are fulfilling this role that all 10 blue links had so far. So eventually stop showing the 10 blue links, right? Because all the links are already there. Embedded and realistically, most of the citations are brought from the 10 blue links. It's a little bit duplicative. It's a duplicative experience in many ways. In any case, I want, really, really want to see the impact of those citations, of those embedded links in the AI overviews more than ever. And before they become more prevalent, I don't know what we are waiting to request this more to Google to add them as a filter. Or extra report even in the Google Search Console, please.

But Aleyda, that's not what Google wants. And users don't care about that. What Google wants is to have more personalized results. And you can see that in the shopping announcement where they said they're going to let you pick up where you left off on a shopping experience. That means they're tracking exactly what you've done and they're showing you using AI, like what you want to see. And I think the same will be true with AI overviews. Like the more personalized and generative they can make them, the more expensive it is, but ultimately then the harder it is for SEOs to game it.

I'll just say really quick, bringing in what Aleyda and Cindy were saying is, is this idea that it's more than the AI overviews. Like Google has for so long incentivized the sameness of content. Like the 10 blue links are all similar versions of the same thing, but it's trying with the generative AI to give you, you know, it's using expanded related queries to pull in content from all topics and then down the SERPs as it gets more AI organized with these carousels. It's, they did this whole study, the messy middle, which is behavioral economics, which is this idea of the way that people interact with the SERPs. They expand their search and they contract it and they expand it and they contract it. And so Google's been experimenting with trying to have you do that through filters, through these carousels, and they're going to continue to do that. It's going to ultimately change the user behavior so that the way that we interact with search isn't just trying to find that one link. And to Cindy's point, like Google knows. They track all of our data. They're able to predict in a really creepy way what our next search is going to be. And so for them to basically show us all of that in the same search session is, I feel like the direction that they're going.

To zoom out on what you're saying there, because there's a lot, that's a lot there in all of this. I think like going back to Miracle's point, I think there's a use case where there's a point where the user just wants very like top-level information. Like I, the same thing with like an answer box, right? Like what's the weather outside? I just want to know like very, very quickly. But I think if you zoom out to how human beings function, there's a need for exploration, there's a need to dive deep. And Gary, we've talked about this privately. You can't fundamentally get away from the need from the human mind to explore something, to want to understand it and to dive deeper into it. So when it matters, those links inside the AIO really matter. And so that's why I feel like you're seeing Google going in one direction a little bit and then another direction a little bit. They go this way and then they go that way. I don't think they've really figured out how to straddle this because I think you're right. I think the entire format of the AA overview doesn't work. And I think what they ultimately want to go to, and it's very expensive, is what they announced when they announced that demo of Gemini where it's a custom format. So let's say I Google, I don't know, Michael Jordan. I can get podcasts about Michael Jordan. I can see videos of Michael Jordan. I get some links and some articles. It's really explorative and it's really a custom format, which you see they're doing on the local surf. In some cases, I'm going to give the mic to somebody else because I've been talking too much.

Thank you very much, Mordy. I think that you, a miracle, brought something that ties very well with the next prediction regarding the importance of brand authority and topical relevance, not only because of, of course, citations matter for AI overview. Thank you very much. It's not only direct links. So this is great on one hand, but also something that I recall very well of what Danny mentioned to me a few months back when I interviewed him, they want to showcase results that people can trust. And what else will enhance and to connect with the people's need of trust of showing brands that they already know, real brands, whether smaller niche brands or very well-known brands out there. And more and more, especially for product-related commercial queries, we see not only the product carousels, but also all the types of features Highlighting brands that offer those types of products, connecting well with what you just mentioned, like providing features, allowing people to explore more from the brands that they already trust. When you have a product carousel with 5 products on a row and you have 2 rows of them, it's like, who cares who ranks first or second or third on the same row? It's about the brand that the user recognizes the most. In this blended SERPs, not in the 10 blue links anymore.

So I think this is definitely the area that SEOs or marketers need to go in. I mean, the reality is, is every day from now and behind, we were using SEO to build a brand when the reality is we need to now build a brand and then SEO becomes the results of that. Because the cruel reality is, and we've seen this over the years, Like, the only thing that's gonna make Google change is if you make them look stupid. When they penalize JCPenney and BMW, and then their users seeking that brand go to Google and you cannot find them, that makes Google look bad. And that is the only way that you're going to be able to diversify, take insurance, however you want to look at it moving forward. You know, you basically have to make Google look And that's what we can do. You know, we can help our clients build a brand, focus less on winning by the thinnest margins just to be able to get a blue link, but absolutely dominate. If somebody is searching for your brand and you do not show up in Google, that makes them look bad and that is going to hurt their market share.

It's a great point, Nick. I, I've been really surprised in a way how we've mentioned before Google being reactive. They've been very reactive this year to bad press. To viral tweets to like the helpful content update, which was a bunch of people on Twitter that were just really pissed off for months and months and months. And Google literally had to respond multiple times. So yeah, in one way it's like, to your point, if the thing you're expecting to see on Google is not showing up on Google, that's not a great experience. I think like there were many examples of the helpful content update where like those sites still don't rank for their own brand names. Those sites still don't appear in AI overviews ever. Like things like that are like. I'm sorry, Google, I think you got that wrong. And I think a lot of people agree with that and they're listening, but sometimes it takes them a year to respond to a lot of negative feedback. So what we're seeing now with site reputation abuse, I think we all know that's something that our industry was complaining about for like 2 years. So I think you have a great point there. And I've, I've again been very surprised, like, how much power the, the industry and the community can have when we kind of like organize and tell them that something is, is not right.

Lily, this connects very well with the next topic here, and I would love to hear your thoughts before you leave regarding the shift that we have seen with these updates and other updates that have been pretty reactive of what a lot of the community and industry have been requesting for a while regarding the quality standards.

Yeah.

And you have been very vocal many times highlighting how the results were not up to the level of quality that was expected. What do you expect next year from this in particular?

Yeah, I mean, it's been an interesting turn of events because I think what happened was so many big brands started to double down on this idea of EEAT, and they were, they were checking all the boxes as far as any EEAT checklist would go, you know, listing their authors, talking about their experience, having expert reviewers, being a big brand, all these things. 35 of them, 40 of them got penalized 2 weeks ago for doing exactly that. They would tell you this was EEAT. They just worked with third parties and things like this. But so the goalposts keep kind of changing, or like the way that we do this keeps changing. But I think if you stay true to like, this is my brand, these are my experts, we work in-house, we specialize in these things, and not trying to go after all these different traffic grabs, you should probably be safe. But yeah, I mean, the landscape just keeps changing because as soon as something works really well, everybody doubles down on that. Google has to change the algorithm.

I think this is a good point. Actually, when I was taking a look at publications that were hit with the parasite update, there were some very major prominent review sections or publications that were not, but these are some of the publications that started reviewing products like way, way long before that. It's not a trend that they jump into like a year and a half ago or a couple of years ago, just to make the most out of it with content that was completely alien to what their editorial scope was already. So I think that it definitely has to do a lot with, again, what is your brand known for at the end of the day?

Yeah, I think it has become more and more important because previously has, you know, more space to show user what they're looking for. And now it's just one big place. So if you talk about second link after position 0, right? That barely has any CTR. So now if you have only one place and you know, now you're not the only one in the game, right? There is OpenAI which is competing and gaining the visibility continuously. So you're more scared about it and that's why you're more serious about content quality and then authority as well. That's why that one shot that Google has to convince a user about the quality content that they have and therefore this has become more and more important. And I think we also spoke about some experimentation. I see that happening more like 10x, 100x more in 2025 because that's how Google is still, you know, like Mordy mentioned before. So Google is still trying to understand what user needs. And for that, they would need a lot of experiments and that will keep happening. And you would see like a lot of shifts in content, how they're understanding content quality and all of that.

This topic takes it back to that brand authority thing. And that's become super, super important. Like when Google started with AI overviews, they used to pull in niche sites and now it's just like major recognizable brand because it's so expensive to crawl and evaluate all of these sites. And that's why building a brand— and when we say building a brand, not just like that brand awareness, it's like standing for something because Google is going so personal so that they know, okay, this person is eco-conscious in that they would like XYZ brand and we will serve it to them. And when they click on it, we'll serve it to them again. And generic search is converting less and less. I think more and more as I work in-house, a lot of CEOs are saying it drove us this much generic impressions, so what? Because brand converts better, brand does better. And it's now how SEO can help brand grow rather than how SEO can help generic. And it's also the best way to kind of algorithm-proof your website because if you take a hit in generic and you have no brand awareness, then what happens? So that diversification, that building your own community, and it's not just setting up like a Reddit subset, it's about being hyper-focused on like what you're relevant for and what you're going for, building that community around it and testing and testing and learning from that community. Because Google is more and more cloaking its data. So it's never been more important to be like, let your brand stand for something. And the audience is getting more and more wary with AI overview, like with AI in general, about everything that's been produced. And also we have visual fatigue and we just have content fatigue. Like there's too many things everywhere. Too many things and they all look alike. Like I Google, you know, a search for like black shoes and I have 1 million websites selling black shoes. I'm just gonna go to where I trust because I can't deal with it. I even stopped shopping on websites that have like too many products because after like 10 scrolls, I'm, I'm just too tired. I'm too tired to, I'm too tired to scroll anymore. And, and that's why, you know, it would go back to brand building, back to like being hyper niche, back to building a community that wants your product and likes you and whether— and that difference is, yes, there will always be economic challenges, but if I like shopping with you because you're eco-conscious, if I like shopping with you because you're accessible, like those are the things that we really need to start focusing on because marketing is so expensive now.

Oh my God, nailed it.

I think it just comes back to, you know, it's like, how are we being very intentional in building a brand around the concept of being exceptionally good at something versus everything, because we're living in a world where everybody is tasked with do more with less, and you just can't anymore. Like, the efficiencies are gone. So I think the reality is, is how do you take that step back and do more within that area that you're really good at, or have respect, or have a brand built around it?

I totally agree with this. And first off, like, Miracle, like, you get like point god. Like, that was like That was like amazing. Because if you take a step back, I have a hot take on this. This is so hot. I think we're entering a digital winter. Okay. There's so much noise and there's so much chatter and you're not just competing with online experiences, you're competing with what you're seeing offline. And that actually resonates. That's actually real. That's not in my face. It gives me more autonomy. So you're basically battling a 2-front war. You're dealing with all this noise in digital and you're dealing with the fact that sometimes real life media resonates a heck of a lot better than digital media. And brands are, if you zoom out, brands are making, and I think it's what seeps into the SEO equation, they're chasing their own tails. They're usually often chasing their own tails. They're going out, let's take the AI thing. Instead of focusing on core identity and developing core identity, which is what we're all talking about here, they're going after whatever the next AI thing is. You do the same thing in SEO, like whatever the next big search volume keyword is, we go after that. And what the solution to all of this is, if you focus on what Miracle said before, having meaningful core identity, but it has to be meaningful. It can't just be surface level because a lot of these brands thought they had meaningful core identity and now they're all over the place chasing AI and they're wondering, they're literally wondering, how did this happen? And it's happened because the core identity they thought they had they never actually had. So developing that core identity, asking yourself, like, and the way you do that, by the way, is asking yourself the emotion that we're targeting. Is it a surface-level emotion? Like fun. I don't need to have fun today. I'll have fun on the weekend. It's not really an integral emotion, right? Or is it integral to the human experience where I can't live without this? And if the emotion that you're targeting is almost existential, if who you are is almost existential, you have core depth and you have core identity, and that should usually keep you on track. And it'll— It should keep you from chasing after things like AI, and it should keep you from chasing after search keywords that are not related to your core brand.

Mordy, I'm going to make a hot take right now based off of what you had said and what Miracle said. There's always a longstanding joke that SEO is dying this year, has died, all that, but it's not Google that's going to kill SEO. It's not even marketers that are going to necessarily kill SEO. Attribution is going to kill SEO.

Let me just put like one minor spin on what we've all been saying that puts it in a different light, which is to say that Google ranking brand results, big brand results, and Google rewarding quality and, and not looking for the newest, like, niche thing also saves them money. Like, that's an easier compute process. They can just surface the answer that they already know and not look for the needle in the haystack, which is hard and expensive and risky for spam.

SEO should align to initiatives that are all over the organization. So it's not necessarily that will drive the brand strategy, but we need to talk with the marketers already leading the brand strategy and actually understanding the brand and start asking those questions rather than the typical keyword research that we have been doing so far and blending more this more traditional marketing strategies into our SEO process in order to enhance and make the most out of the brand of the companies that we work for. Unfortunately, in SEO, we tend to focus too much on the tactics or the characteristics that are the outcome of what we should actually focus on and care about, which is actually building and developing, well, a real product and blending SEO best practices into that. So food for thought there. And just to finish the predictions part of our today's edition. Diversification beyond Google. When your clients come or your bosses come and ask, should we already start optimizing for ChatGPT or SearchGPT? How are you dealing with that? I will say that it has always been healthy to diversify beyond Google, of course, but are we really at that stage that when this diversification becomes critical? And if so, is it really to LLMs or social platforms or Or what else?

You know, the idea of diversifying and like building that brand, I think it's almost the opposite. We're on the front lines seeing the change in Google traffic, and we need to go to the brands and tell them, hey, wait a second, like what you thought was possible organically is not the same as it used to be anymore. Because we're seeing the actual outcomes. Because here's the hot take. We've all, like everyone, not just SEOs, have become so drunk on performance. That most brands don't have an actual brand anymore.

Well, I think that just goes back to kind of what we had said before with attribution. You know, if it doesn't come in landing page, organic search, SEO doesn't get credit, when in reality everything that we've always been doing has been helpful across many, many channels. And that's one thing that I'm trying to challenge all my clients for. It's like, yes, I'm an SEO consultant, but how are we approaching SEO is just like organic visibility, increasing, you know, organic reach. And that can be, you know, with AI, LLMs, and social and YouTube and all that kind of fun stuff, but also just challenging the status quo of what is the value added to other channels because other initiatives are taking place. You know, and I think that's where we're going to be because so many people are looking at their ROI of just the organic search channel. And I don't know about all of you guys, but it's like, The case or the, the dollars, it's not as obvious as it used to be. And I think we're just in a situation where we've got to evolve.

But diversification is the answer for smaller brands that can't compete with the bigger brands because people go to Google for like the easy, obvious answer. And when people are digging deep, they start elsewhere.

Just before I forget, your comment right now reminded me, have you seen brand research that he published a week ago? Exactly about that, how Google has become the platform for navigational searches that users pretty much support to find for the information that they already know that they want from the brands that they like, not necessarily to discover new or get inspired for new products. For that, they go to social very likely, right?

Yeah. Well, I was going to say it was like, it just depends on the brand, isn't it? The size of the client, the industry, if it's a beauty brand, Definitely, if you're not on social, you're not even in the game. So like, if it's a fashion brand, it just depends on the brand that we're talking about and the size. Like with all my small clients, I say definitely start from social because you're not going to— Google needs to recognize you as something before it even bothers. Like there is like a million people out there doing the same thing. So it needs to recognize you as a brand before it thinks you're worth indexing and pulling your content in the site. Like I've seen a lot of clients that they get indexed, but Google doesn't even bother pulling their content Because it's like there's 7 million already of you. Yes, we acknowledge you're here, but you're not in the game. So you have to get in the game on other platforms first, get that recognition, build that brand before you go to organic. And again, as I think, was it Nick was saying, it's all about blended CPA when it comes to that measurement. We all have to work together and stop being prideful because we argue about attribution all day long. And nobody ever agrees that this channel takes 20%, 10%. So we just have to look at the blended CPA. If it works from a blended CPA perspective, then we know that all marketing works. And then the final thing I wanted to add from here is like permissions, permissions, permissions. I know this is like an SEO thing, but this will be the year of like we chasing after CRM for permissions, permissions, and learning from that data. Because if we can't learn from like the wider data, then we have to find like the audience we've grown already. And I think this is where big brands will win, isn't it? The other ends we've grown, you know, we've, we've grown already. How can we learn from them? What can we do with them? What can they tell us that they're, they're happy with and what they're doing?

To, to Miracle's point, I'm totally with you, is like the thing we need to remember is everyone's playing a different game. You mentioned the different sizes is like the rules for big brands on Google are different than the rules for niches. Like we all get frustrated when you can break the rules and still get rewarded, but that's just the nature of the game. And so, you know, focusing on where you are going to diversify Depends on the game that you're playing. So I completely agree with Miracle. And with the attribution thing, SEO has never been more holistic, whether it is a, you know, a supporting channel or your main channel. It really, A, depends on your game, B, how all the channels work together, but you need to consider the direction of AI. People are lazy and people are going to continue to search the way that they search until things are forced in front of them. And that's the big discussion with the whole DOJ antitrust trial is Google's been in front of everybody for so long until people start playing with these other channels, AI search, you know, going to social, nothing's going to change.

Yeah, it needs to become much more convenient and much more easy and blended into their day-to-day. And 100% regarding the DoG, that this might end up being even more game-changing than any new LLM that tries to simplify the way that Google comes up with results pretty much, which is what they have been doing. So to start wrapping up, I would love to hear about your top tips based on all of the predictions that we have been discussing and the trends and more that you can take a look at in the SEO FOMO survey results. I have here quite a few tips regarding the integration with branding and marketing. Also high quality, original, trustworthy content, intent-focused topic clustering strategies, technical excellence, and user experience that Of course, it's the base of everything else at the end of the day. What are your top tips based on all what we have mentioned or something new that potentially we haven't mentioned that you want to leave the audience with today to win SEO in 2025?

I think the biggest tip that I'm going to give is just go about building fans. Literally, that's going to be the best way to build your brand. is by winning each individual customer. So focus on your customers. I know it sounds cliché, but let's turn them all into super fans.

Love it.

My tip would be SEO cannot survive or win in 2025 in isolation. So you can't just play this game in silos anymore, right? You need to think about 360-degree content strategy where you think about even for like small brands, right? When you're competing against bigger brands, the advantage that you have is flexibility, you can move faster. So think about, for example, video commerce, which is a huge thing already in China, right? If you are a small brand, maybe here in Germany competing against brands like Zalando, that's something you can do. So yeah, 360-degree content strategy is something which can still give you that push, which is much needed to succeed in 2025 and beyond.

I think the big thing playing into that is our shift in mindset of keywords to bigger topical strategies and really knowing our audience. We're going to see more personal personalization. We need to fill in the gaps and make sure that we're speaking specifically to different types of audiences. It's frustrating because we want to be able to win at scale with big volume, but all content is going to have to get much more zeroed in and appeal to specific audiences, and you need to know your audience to do that.

I think that the biggest thing for me is if you think about like all the things we're talking about here, if you, if you look and zoom out and you look at the whole digital ecosystem as a whole You'll be able to really understand like what works, what doesn't work, where things are moving, where things are not moving, what problems are present. So you can kind of go around them or get around them the best that you can. So stop looking at like SEO or social. It's one digital ecosystem that kind of all interacts together. And the more you're in touch or in tune with that ecosystem, the better.

My tip is follow the money. And this is especially about figuring out if, you know, I like figuring out where Google's going to go next and what they're going to do. And the way I usually start that is following the money and we have to stop thinking about Google as if it was run by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It's run by some McKinsey guys who are all about cutting costs and maximizing profits at all costs. And that may even be the cost of the diversity of the web. Like, they don't care. So they will cut that out to save compute cost, to funnel it to AI so that they can win that game, because that's the bigger long-term game. So think about it In terms of what will McKinsey guys cut and what will they preference when they're making those decisions?

And I would say a lot of what we've talked about here just comes down to brand building. It just comes down to having fans. It comes down to, you know, Google now and a lot of consumers are not caring about what you're saying about yourself because trust is so eroded and people care about what other people are saying about you. So making sure that as a brand you're building a fan base And you're serving them well. And so that they can keep coming back to you because it's easy to have like to resell to loyal customers than to go out and get brand new ones. And it's all about defining what you stand for and going after it really targetedly rather than just casting your net so wide.

I couldn't agree more. I think I am going to double down because this will be realistically the overarching layer across any other area being known and good and the best. On what you do in your area, your product should be loved and should be recognized for something. And if your website and your entity and your brand at the end of the day is not recognized for something, you will have a very, very hard time included in the AI overviews, being clicked on the product carousels, even if you are featured there, like the users will likely not click on you first. And one of the things I believe that I have gotten to understand better while consulting also for more well-known and more enterprise-level companies is the share of traffic that comes from the brand. And many of you, a lot of you know this well, like the share of branded, non-branded. And these companies track their branded searches, optimize for the branded searches, because it's not only to acquire more customers, but also providing the best support because there's also a cost for support to help them upgrade, up- upsell, cross-sell, and helping them to engage more and buy more and stay with the brand at the end of the day, because many times it costs less than acquiring new customers too. So we need to start thinking along those lines, even like at a micro level, if you're a small player still, but you need to apply this same type of thinking, of criteria into what you do. Unfortunately, I see a lot of companies asking a lot about, oh, Programmatic because I want to scale, but I don't see many thinking, oh, a community. How can I leverage a community to have also content at scale with the blend of uniqueness and real expertise and real experience from customers that will become my fans, as Nick mentioned, right? So I want to leave with these thoughts regarding if you're in SEO and haven't asked the company that you work with, what is the brand about, what they we want to be known for, what is their unique selling proposition, and start also monitoring and optimizing and trying to grow their branded queries as you do with your non-branded ones. I think this is definitely the time. It's not that you will become a brand marketer or a brand manager all of a sudden. No, it's not about rebranding ourselves or becoming something that we are not, but having a better understanding as marketers of something that we have been actually done for a while already in order to take our game and align what we do with this a little bit more sophisticated way of Google is doing things. So thank you. Thank you, everybody. I really appreciate your thoughts, your tips, and your predictions too. I think that they are very actionable and hopefully they have also opened the eyes of a lot of the community of things that they should be worried or not about, or how they should think certain things that are happening. And how to address a lot of the doubts and questions that arise with decision makers out there. So thank you very much. And if you love today's episode, please like it, share it with your SEO friends. So we all keep up and are aligned. And remember to subscribe to the channel, subscribe to SEO FOMO to keep up with the latest news too. And please start following all of these very savvy, experienced SEOs that you can learn a lot from. So. Make sure to start following them if you haven't. It will be a great way to start 2025. Thank you very much. Until the next edition, bye-bye.