SEO trends: How to rank in 2025

SEO is becoming increasingly challenging as both search engines and users set higher expectations. Search results are evolving, with shopping experiences shifting from traditional product category pages to search engines, while AI-driven search engines are transforming standard blue links into dynamic, information-rich conversations.

What is happening with traditional SEO signals?

Keywords and optimised content

Technical foundation

High-quality backlinks

User experience

Traditional signals such as:

targeting keywords with high-quality, optimised content,
strong technical hygiene that ensures smooth website use and crawlability,
high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites in the field and
great user experience at every stage of the user journey

still play a huge role going forward. But they only form the foundation of what is needed to get websites to the top.

SEO practices need to evolve beyond the essential signals to help websites rank and show up in AI search engines. Search engines closely analyse those traditional and advanced signals that indicate your site is the best option to present to users.

Brand signals

Search engines, AI scrapers and users make their decisions based on the strength of your brand. Just imagine a new startup producing jeans and trying to compete with Levi’s.

To ensure users and search engines recognize the strength of your brand, you need to establish your brand as an entity. This means the Organisation structured data, robust “About us” pages and brand mentions on other domains are essential.

“About us” page is important because it establishes brand trust.

Your “About us” page should clearly define exactly what your company does, establish your brand voice and build trust. One of the key elements is your brand name, which must remain consistent throughout your website, social media, PR articles and brand mentions on other domains.

Google’s processing is sensitive to spelling and casing, thus different variations of your brand name (such as lowercase lettering or using a domain name instead of brand name) may be interpreted by Google as two different entities.

Additionally, domain authority, which is the direct result of high-quality backlinks from thematically relevant domains that drive users to your website and present your brand to a wider audience, plays a crucial role in improving your site’s visibility.

Authority signals

To rank for your target keywords, you need to demonstrate authority in this field. This became glaringly obvious after the helpful content update, when sites trying to rank for thousands of unrelated keywords suddenly saw a huge drop in traffic.

Here’s an example: whose advice would you trust when planning a trip to a specific city in a less touristy country? Would it be a blog written by someone who lives in this country and writes exclusively about it, or a giant travel blog giving you the top 5 things to do in almost every city around the globe?

How to get authority signals? The standard E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) guidelines still apply. In fact, they are more important than ever.

You can demonstrate authority by highlighting who produces your content and explaining why they are experts in their field.

Create author pages that demonstrate the experience your authors have in their field, which helps build trust. Are your authors already established authorities in their fields and have published previous work on other relevant domains? Even better.

Use author pages to show your content is written by experienced and trust-worthy experts.

Form content clusters that cover a specific topic in depth. This approach not only broadens the scope of related keywords you can target but also positions you as the definitive authority on the topic.

User signals

Google’s document leak confirmed what the SEO community has long suspected: Google uses clicks on search results and user activity on the site (in the Chrome browser) as ranking signals. While we have no such data for other search engines, it is reasonable to assume they use similar metrics.

User experience (UX) and SEO can no longer be seen as two separate silos. They need to work together.

Make sure your content drives users to engage with your website by offering them videos they can watch, documents to download, engaging content that convinces them to subscribe to a newsletter, detailed product descriptions, images that they can scroll through and an easy checkout process that increases their willingness to complete the user journey.

Optimising how your search results appear in search engines is vital not only to get more traffic but also to rank better.

How?

By using structured data,
giving as much information as possible,
focusing on user needs and the intents behind their searches, and
answering questions users are interested in.

To find out what users want, user-generated content is a trove of useful information that convinces other users to buy from you or trust your services. It offers search engines and AI scrapers additional information to better understand your content, and it gives marketers a large amount of first-hand user feedback on what interests them the most about a product or service.

Want to know more about how to improve your rankings in search engines?

Contact us

Maja Petek

SEO and Content Marketing Strategist

I have several skills but only one mission: to help Optiweb’s clients reach the top of search results.