The Best SEO and Growth Tactics for 2025

These are the best SEO tactics for 2025. The best SEO tactic for 2025, I believe, is actually diversifying away from SEO. And I'll let Neil elaborate on that. But what I mean by that is we look at this Google exploit, which we can talk about in a moment. We can talk about some of the takeaways there. And there's also a lot revealed with Google's algorithm earlier this year, right? But one of the things that sticks out to me, because I watched that exploit video, that was a 37-minute video, I watched it earlier this week. towards the end of it, he showed a SERP and he's like, the number 1 result, the number 2 result, they didn't necessarily have all the links. They didn't have the biggest authority out there. And so it just goes to show that the algorithm is changing quite a bit, right? And that was only one search engine result page. But I think, you know, the quote that sticks with me, Rand Fishkin, who founded Moz, said that SEO used to kind of stand on its own. Now it's kind of a side effect of all the work that you're doing, right? And so I do believe more and more people are going to diversify away from SEO. And I also think it's too risky to rely on SEO. Like, It's happening slowly right now. People's traffic is going down and down, but I think it's going to be like an all of a sudden thing, right? So you have to look at getting away from it and Neil can elaborate on what that means.

Yeah, and I'll give my tactic after. But what Eric's talking about is what we call at our agency Search Everywhere Optimization. People are searching on all these platforms. There's 45.1 billion searches a day. Google makes up roughly 18% of the market with 8.5 billion searches a day. ChatGPT is at roughly a billion a day. You got 6.5 billion a day on Instagram, 3.5 billion on the Amazon App Store. Bing has quite a bit. Even the Apple App Store, you have around 500 million a day. I don't recall all of them, but those are some of the ones that I know off the top of my head. And the purpose of searching on all these platforms vary. On the Apple App Store, you're searching to download an app, but there's still money to be made there. You know, it could be you're searching for an app for e-commerce or buying something. Or on the flip side for Amazon, you're searching to buy buy something, very transactional. Those are very key money searches that drive a lot of revenue. But if you look on the other side with just businesses like, you know, Instagram, when you search on Instagram, you're looking for content, for educational, recreational, or just pure, you know, entertainment, like, or shopping, like you're looking for a purse or whatever it may be, or you're looking for a friend or their content or just doing research. So the purpose of searching on all these platforms varies, But the only way to do well is to optimize for all of them because the attention is truly divided no matter what people say.

Yep, and this comes from 2 people that love SEO. I mean, I grew up in SEO, same for Neil as well. But it's also important to understand where the puck is skating to, sorry, skate to where the puck is going. That's what I was trying to say.

Yes, and in essence, what we're saying is SEO has evolved from search engine optimization, you know, being traditional Google, to search everywhere optimization where you have to optimize for all the platforms and channels people are using. And when we look at people on TikTok or Instagram, Instagram, they all want to optimize for the most likes and engagement. But yet these platforms like Instagram and TikTok have so many searches a day. We rarely ever hear from companies saying, hey, when someone types in X, Y, and Z, like a purse, we want our purse company to show up. Right? And these are little things that are going to start becoming much more popular because they can drive a lot of revenue, especially with these channels becoming easier to create a shop on and letting people click a button and just buy your product.

Search everywhere optimization is YouTube, it's Amazon, it's App Store optimization, it's LLM optimization or generative engine optimization. It's really where anyone can search, right? Because humans will always search for things as long as humans are around because we're curious. So that's what it is.

My favorite tactic for 2025 is going to be global SEO with AI. And here's what I mean by this. If we look at our traffic and most big corporations' traffic from SEO, they're not getting it from the United States or just one language like English. English makes up usually less than 30% of their traffic if they're doing global SEO right. It's from a lot of other languages that add up. But it's a pain to do this. You have to hire a lot. But with AI, you can translate and transcribe your content and then have a human review, make sure you're using the right keywords and adjusting the titles and meta descriptions. It allows you to scale out your global SEO strategy much quicker and just generate way more traffic faster. Make sure you use hreflang and build links to those pages that are translated/transcribed and you should see your traffic go up these other countries without having to hire tons of people within each country. And then what you'll find is you now have new markets to sell to.

You know what I want to do with this podcast? I want to take it to ElevenLabs and translate it to Hindi, to translate it to Mandarin, translate it to Spanish, Portuguese, everything, right? Because it's just, it just keeps getting better and better. HeyGen is getting better and better. ElevenLabs is getting better and better. And I was looking at some of the case studies from ElevenLabs earlier this week. And You know, by the way, there's like, there's some examples where someone just makes it global, like they globalize their, their podcast. And some other examples, they take someone's voice, and they take all the books that she's written, and they just make it into podcasts because she doesn't have time to make audiobooks, right? So I think we're gonna see a lot more use cases there. So that's an interesting growth tactic for people. But speaking of growth tactics, we're gonna give you our number one growth tactic for 2025. All right, quick note, this is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside. So my number 1 growth tactic for 2025, it's an oldie but a goodie. It's building products and services, products, products mainly. Sorry, products or tools. And Neil has on his chart, it shows that tools have some of the highest ROI. I believe it's 5x or more, right?

Uh-huh.

That's what I saw. If you can build, because I do believe the cost of software is coming down. So the cost of software is coming down, that means you can build more things. And I saw Jason Lemkin tweet this. He's like, in today's day and age, if because the cost is coming down, you have to ship a lot faster, your velocity has to be a lot faster. So if you don't have a good CTO, you're basically screwed, right? That's what he was saying, that in nice words. So if you can code, great, amazing. You can think about building products. And what happens with some of these products, because Things are happening so quickly now. You can build a product that pulls you because there's a lot of solutions that people need out there. I've seen some products out there where it just pulls you. And if it pulls you, not only is it going to drive more leads for your business, it's going to drive more revenue and you can— you have more opportunities to cross-sell and upsell. And Neil's done this quite a bit with his— like, Neil's probably 5, 6+ tools, products that you built at least, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. And they've worked out well.

Uh-huh. Yep. Tools have done really well for us. My number one growth tactic for 2025 is automatically translate and transcribe your content within the platform. So here's a problem with just using like a HeyGen or any of these tools. You translate, let's say this podcast episode from English to Hindi. Now you got to build a whole new YouTube channel for Hindi. Pain in the butt. On the flip side, YouTube has a feature now. I don't know if you've seen it. You can actually click a button and they'll transcribe. Yes, they'll automatically do it.

I forgot they had that.

And you— it's not available to everyone, but it's going to be soon released to everyone. You watch. And I know for a fact other social networks are already working on this. I've talked to some engineers at Meta and I've talked to engineers at TikTok. It's a question of when will they all release this. This way, you, Eric, or me, Neil, we won't have to create 20 different social profiles. Now our content that's great is just applicable to all regions, all languages, One social profile, we don't need 10 or 20 of them. We will all start doing way better with our social content, get way more reach, likes, and engagement.

Yep.

You do. You just have to enable it though, right? I don't think people will do that though.

You actually triggered an idea here. So Gemini 2.0 came out and so they also have an API for their agent, just like how Claude has an API for their agent, which can run your computer, right? I can see a lot of the situation where we just have a bunch of computers. It almost reminds me of when I went to Neil's place in Seattle. when he had a computer that was just focused on following people on Twitter. Yeah, on Twitter. So the beauty of this is I think we're going to see that. We're going to see a lot of agents doing this work because it's complex stuff. You have to click around and things like that, right? And so, you know, oh, translating a blog post, like that's going to require some clicking around, right? And then posting it and then also repurposing that content and then posting it to different platforms. I think that's going to become a big thing. And that's almost like you're going to— you're basically going to need an AI agent manager. That's what you're going to need. You're going to need a human managing these AI agents. I think we're going to see that. And I think that's going to be a great growth tactic, maybe not in 2025, but definitely for 2026. So I'm going— I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit here.

I agree with you. I think it's going to be a great growth tactic and it's going to be really efficient because unlike back in the day, you won't have to even buy computers. They'll just spin up instances for you on the cloud and it'll save you, you know, the $2,000 for an Apple computer.

Yep. Anyway, that's it for today and we'll catch you tomorrow.