}
Jojo Furnival
Can you believe we’re heading into 2025? Holy guacamole. Anyway, it’s time to review the insights we gleaned from the SEO community this year and curate some key SEO trends that will follow through into 2025.
4 SEO trends to put on your agenda in 2025:
1. JavaScript SEO
“As an industry, we need to level up our understanding of JS and how to optimize websites to utilize it best. JS isn't going away anytime soon.”
Nick LeRoy Freelance SEO Consultant
“As an industry, we need to level up our understanding of JS and how to optimize websites to utilize it best. JS isn't going away anytime soon."
Nick said this in mid 2024. Make no mistake, JavaScript SEO will be a crucial part of technical SEO in 2025.
When we released our JavaScript SEO Report in 2024, influential SEOs had a lot to say about the results, one of whom was Tory Gray of Gray Dot Co:
"One of the primary challenges of Google’s documentation on JS rendering is that it seems squarely aimed at developers, when it should ideally meet the needs of two very different key stakeholders: developers AND SEOs. … At Gray Dot, we find that using this documentation doesn’t put us much closer to being on the same page in terms of what’s needed for SEO and why — even when working with highly experienced developers. If senior developers and 15+ year SEOs can’t connect the dots, it’s a good sign these resources are falling short."
Googler Martin Splitt’s response to the research was to “do better to provide resources in our documentation and on our Youtube channel for people to gain a better understanding of the topic and gain confidence in explaining these issues, too.”
So expect this to be the case in 2025. We’re hoping Google is going to step it up in terms of guidance in JavaScript SEO; because if there’s one thing we’re sure about, it’s that client-side rendering will remain an inexact science in 2025.
2. AI-driven Search
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll be aware that AI is rapidly shaking up search. We held two webinars this year that revealed super-interesting insights into AI and the future of search.
The first was our Google data leak and DOJ trial deep dive with Marie Haynes. Marie’s attitude to AI seemed to be one of excitement and if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em.
“When will Gemini be mainstream? Well, just this week I got it on my phone. I got Gemini Live and some people are getting it in Google Assistant, and I wrote a piece probably a year ago or so about how I think this will be the main way that people search. And so I think given that so many people already use Google for searches, it won't be much of a leap. They're already starting to get us into the ecosystem with AI overviews.”
Then the following month, we welcomed AI Consultant Britney Muller to Sitebulb for a webinar on optimizing for AI outputs. She gave us some advice on how to help your brand to appear in AI Overviews for the searches you want.
“If I want to optimise for AI Overviews, and reading through Google's patent, it becomes more and more evident that you need to be showing up in other relevant queries. So, they're not just looking at the query results for whatever you're searching for. They're actually inspecting other ranking URLs for people that search your query, that searched this before or after, or in your area.
There's levels to this in terms of context, entities. This is a big reason why you see so many people like Mike King talking about the advantages of schema markup, right? Because we can sort of continue to spoon-feed search engines, "Hey, this is what my company is. This is what we're about."”
So, if you’re not already factoring entity SEO into your strategy, you need to be in 2025.
However, personally I would caution throwing all your proverbial eggs in the AI basket; it’s too soon to know for sure how all this is going to play out. ChatGPT Search, which many in the industry were excited/nervous about, has been found to misattribute news content. Not only that, but we have a responsibility to understand what the global impact might be of the hype around AI.
SEO and Digital Strategist, Kavi Kardos, told me that the pressure to explore generative AI’s potential for work efficiency and scalability is having less than ideal consequences.
“As an agency leader, I can say that our SEO team is definitely facing pressure from clients to "optimize for" more interactive models like ChatGPT and AI Overviews. One question that isn't being asked nearly enough is whether the environmental impact of generative AI systems truly justifies their novelty. As of now, it's estimated that generative AI will account for 1.5% of the world's power consumption by 2029 — with some estimates putting it closer to 3.5%. The amount of electricity and water required to power the servers that enable a company like OpenAI to run ChatGPT is staggering, and it feels even more so when you consider the relatively impractical applications these tools tend to get used for. SEOs and other people working on the internet have a responsibility to balance the hype around generative AI, and their actual usage of it, with environmental conscientiousness.”
3. User Intent
It’s been the case for a while that content is becoming less about putting keywords in the right places, and more about responding to the intent behind the searcher’s query.
Founder of HelloSEO, Jade Pruett, believes there are better ways for Content Managers to use their time than focusing on purely keyword-based optimization.
“While selecting a target keyword is still a big part of my content strategy, I've found stressing about supplemental keywords is a waste of time. Google (and users) are craving original, actually helpful content that showcases a business’ true expertise. If you can create something new and useful, you'll be shocked how quickly it rises in the ranks AND meets your conversion goals. My favorite way to achieve this is to interview subject matter experts or business owners who know their users better than anyone. Weaving in their personal stories, anecdotes, and true expertise into every piece of content will outrank keyword stuffing any day.”
Vanda Pókecz, Head of SEO at Atolls, points out that the very concept of user intent is evolving.
“Simply knowing whether a search query has an informational or transactional intent for example is not enough. We need to dig deeper to actually understand true user intent. What are the people we‘re aiming to serve actually trying to accomplish? What is the need or pain point we can help them achieve or overcome? These are questions we should be focusing on. SEOs should focus on interacting more with UX researchers and teams that actually interact with users, in order to learn more about the true needs and intent of the humans they try to serve.”
Tooba Jamal suggests using “AI, topic filters, and search insights to identify content gaps and fully satisfy user intent. This ensures that your target audience finds all the answers they need without seeking other channels. Addressing content gaps effectively can also help you win positions in generative search overviews and related searches.”
Content Strategy Director, Melissa Popp, has her own (reverse) strategy to suggest:
“User intent will continue to grow as a driving force in SEO, making traditional keyword targeting begin to feel outdated. Instead of fixating on specific terms, the key will be deeply understanding user behavior and creating content that aligns with their needs. To master this shift, prioritize exploring honest conversations in forums, social media, and community hubs where emerging questions are being asked. After publishing, embrace a reverse search strategy—test your content through diverse queries to ensure it meets different search intents. It will be even more critical as Google gets smarter at interpreting nuanced queries.”
Finally, International SEO Consultant, Isaline Muelhauser, adds this interesting perspective:
“Working with Swiss German websites targeting the three linguistic areas in Switzerland, I notice that a well researched article answering completely and uniquely an audience in one language does not offer similar results in another linguistic region. The competition in the search landscape is different: search results from neighbouring same language countries appear in search. The semantic field and writing strategy differ: people organise their thoughts and knowledge according to their language. The examples and mentions in the text may create different feelings for the user. Understanding the writing styles of a language and the needs of an audience go hand in hand with user intent research. Finally, the current social context may lead to a different need for a similar keyword. For content dedicated to driving organic traffic, I recommend copywriting and not translation. Open up your content calendar to inputs from your local copywriter.”
Here’s International SEO Consultant, Raquel Gonzalez, explaining how localization is not simply about translation in our October webinar. You need to ask yourself, is the subject matter still going to be useful and relevant in the new target market?
4. Fewer Opportunities to Win
In 2025, there will be fewer opportunities to win in search.
AI Overviews are producing (even) more zero-click searches. Not only that, but Google’s investment in developing AI has meant it is “no longer maintaining operational carbon neutrality” (according to their latest environmental report). AI is mega expensive and power-intensive. So It makes sense that Google would be seeking ways to make up that shortfall elsewhere. And they are, with indexing.
Google is indexing fewer and fewer pages, dumping pages that offer low quality content, so they don't have to store the data or re-render the pages (which is expensive).
As Daniel Foley puts it: “What is the point in storing content that will never be served or is highly unlikely to be served? What is the point in storing content if there are 10 million other iterations of the same thing already indexed? …Google doesn't need to index 10,000,000 lemon cake recipes.”
Ashleigh Noad, Senior SEO Consultant at Builtvisible, notes the importance this has for ecommerce businesses:
“Retailers and websites using faceted navigation are becoming visibility ‘losers’ as Google seems to be indexing less pages. Google appears to be increasingly considering faceted pages as a poor use of ‘perceived inventory’ — a key factor in influencing crawl budget. In 2025, retailers which have been relying on a pseudo-programmatic approach and longtail keyword strategy should be ensuring that faceted, indexable pages are fully-optimising on-page elements with the user in mind. Or perhaps even reconsidering the indexing logic which informs the crawl depth of the site. To do this well, split testing, ongoing monitoring of the Page report in Google Search Console and log file analysis must become ‘BAU’ tools in validating changes not only in terms of performance but also crawl requests and indexing.”
Stuart Melling of hosting company, 34SP, agrees that user behaviour should be front of mind:
“I like to think that a sustainable web and SEO go somewhat hand in hand. In reducing search's carbon footprint, we ultimately want less frustrating searches where users are clicking link after link looking for pertinent information. The compute-resources from both the search side of the equation and that of the failed serving site ultimately need to be reduced. In an ideal world, the user’s search goal should be met with the first result they click through to. This aligns precisely with Google’s relentless efforts to focus on user intent and rewarding sites in the SERPs that better meet that intent.”
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