The basics of SEO have not changed … 

And the basic tenets that I’ve been preaching for years are still in force. Create content consistently that is:

• Unique: Create unique content that is not copied or reused from other sources. Write content from your perspective, your experience, your knowledge base and for your target audience.
• Relevant: Create content on topics that are relevant to your industry, to your expertise and to your target audience.
• Keyword-Rich: While not writing content that is focused on adding keywords, you should have a list of keywords, in mind or on paper, that your article should include organically. Do not compromise the quality of your article to repeat the same keywords over and over, but use synonyms and related words/phrases that relate to the keywords you are trying to target search results for.
• Consistent: Write content consistently, but the frequency in which you add content is going to determine your success. The age of your site will determine the necessity for increased frequency, as it takes 20-30 blogs before you will see noticeable improvement in your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking and traffic. The point is to blog as often as you can, with consistency and regularity. 

So what trends are we seeing in 2025 and what recent Google algorithm changes are impacting your website’s traffic and ranking?

TREND ONE: Continue to E-E-A-T Well

As search engine algorithms continue to evolve, Google’s focus on content that meets the E-E-A-T quality test has become more pronounced. What is it and what is its history?

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is a framework that Google’s human reviewers use to assess content quality and search results, called the Search Quality Rater Guidelines. How it started:

• In 2014, the E-E-A-T framework was introduced by Google, with E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) being first mentioned among Quality Raters.
• In 2018, Google rolled out an algorithm update that prioritized content that demonstrated higher E-A-T.
• In 2022, E-A-T became E-E-A-T.  The “E” for experience was added to the framework to recognize the importance of first-hand experiences.
• In 2025, E-E-A-T is set to dominate SEO strategies especially in the increasing usage of poor quality AI-generated content. (We’ll discuss this more in the next trending SEO factor.)

So let’s break E-E-A-T down into more digestible bites:

• E for Experience: Does the content creator have relevant life experience to write on this topic? If they do, then they should also have tried-and-tested advice, authentic insights, and unique opinions.
• E for Expertise: Does the writer have relevant knowledge, skills, training and education to be considered an authoritative voice on this subject matter? If so, they will have the credentials. This becomes even more important when discussing financial or health topics.*
• A for Authority: Is the content writer considered a go-to source on this niche topic? Do they have a reputation as a reliable source on the subject? If so, the website will have backlinks from other authoritative sites, social media mentions, and industry recognitions – all showing authority from outside sources. 
• T for Trust: How reliable, honest and accurate is the content? How secure is your website and how are you protecting your visitors from potential harm? How do you go about protecting your visitors’ privacy? If it is trustworthy, your website will have a secure connection with SSL, a firewall, data encryption, a privacy policy, transparent contact information, and an About page that tells your readers who you are, what you do, why you do it, and why you are qualified to create content on these topics. 

In 2025, as the internet marketing landscape continues to evolve, E-E-A-T is not just a ranking factor for Quality Raters but will become a pivotal SEO strategy now and in the years to come. And this becomes non-negotiable for success when you are writing on topics that relate to people’s physical and financial health.

*When Writing Content on Healthcare or Financial Topics: YMYL Algorithm

Since the advent of the Search Quality Raters Guidelines in 2005, Google realized any content that could negatively or positively impact your health or your wallet needed more careful scrutiny and a higher E-E-A-T score. So they introduced the “Your Money or Your Life” algorithm, often abbreviated as “YMYL”, which refers to a set of guidelines used by Google to set higher standards on webpages that contain information significantly impacting a person’s health, financial stability, or personal safety. 

Google holds these pages to a higher quality standard due to the potential consequences of misleading information, as the content can have a major impact on your “money or life”. So if you are providing advice on your website, ensure you are also promoting your expertise, experience and authority with a listing of your credentials, certifications, degrees and experience in your Author Bio on each blog post.

• Example: A blog about medical advice written by a licensed doctor will be deemed more valuable than a general health blog written by a non-expert.

TREND TWO: Google’s Demand for Higher Quality & Authentic Content as opposed to AI Generated Content

“I predict that in the near future, there will be a correlation between the use of AI and blog success, meaning, the more AI, the less success. At least for now, the AI shortcut is creating an unmistakable pandemic of dull.” – Mark Schaefer

While I have declared my stand against relying on AI to generate content, I also see there is a place for it if used with care and in moderation.* If more and more content creators use AI to generate content on the same topics, they are all going to sound alike, with similar opinions, recommendations, and with a flood of dull, redundant content. AI does not write content that fits in your brand personality, AI does not generate new ideas and AI does not know how to add humor, wit or emotion into your content. Only you can do that.

And the saturation of AI-generated content is affecting Google’s search algorithm now and more so in 2025. Why? Since high-quality human-generated content is becoming rare, Google’s search algorithm is becoming stricter in its definition of rank-worthy content. And it’s not just Google who is tired of reading and ranking bland content:

 “Over half (57%) of B2B sellers disregard marketing team’s content as generic and unresponsive.” – McKinsey & Company

This flood of generic AI content has motivated Google to prioritize more conversational language to avoid spam but also ranking poor quality content. As a result, Google made some big waves in 2024 with major algorithm changes and updates.  

“Google launched seven official and confirmed algorithmic updates in 2024, four core updates and three spam updates. The March 2024 core update was massive, updating several systems within the core algorithm, plus bringing in a few new large spam policies.” – Search Engine Land

So now more than ever, it’s important to write from your authentic voice, your unique experience, and to use your creative writing skills with a focus on your target audience’s intent and questions. Get to know your customers and their demographics considering these questions: Who are they, where do they live, where do they work and what are their goals? What keeps them up at night? What issues or concerns do they have?  How can I provide a solution?  What are they searching for online?

If writing is not your forte or you just don’t have the time, we provide original content writing. We work closely with our clients using an established process where we get into our client’s heads and produce a finished product that is unique, relevant and engaging.

With regular, consistent (either monthly or bimonthly) meetings, we will discuss topics they’d like to discuss with their audience, that will promote their products and services, is relevant to their industry, promotes their expertise and experience in the market, and will include any featured events, seasonal offerings, company news, sales and discounts. With a series of questions, we will interview the client so the content we create authentically represents their company or organization, their products and their unique brand personality.

*In a future blog, we’ll discuss how to use AI in moderation without impairing your SEO reputation with Google.

TREND THREE: Zero Click Searches with Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE)

What is SGE?  Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) is becoming a thing, slowly but steadily changing user behavior by providing AI-generated results at the top of the SERPs. 

WHY? Google has improved its strategy to keep visitors on its own platform, which has led to a decline in organic traffic or clicks to your website. This seems counterintuitive, to me, since their purpose is to provide a library of resources for users to click to find what they are looking for. The user can effectively get the information they were searching for with ‘Zero Clicks’ – meaning they did not click or visit anyone’s site or blog to get what they needed. So although they are curating a response based on brand articles, they are impairing the SEO of the very sources they are retrieving from.

How does SGE affect your site?

Ecommerce or Commercial Websites: If people are looking for a particular service or product and are nearly ready to make that purchase, they are still going to need to visit the company site to shop/checkout, to request a quote or dig deeper into your brand story before converting. 

For Informational Sites or Blogs/Newsfeeds on your Website: For more informational type queries though, Google is generating the answer at the top of the search results with an AI-generated response using several different resources for its answer. So now they do not need to visit your site to read the full article, possibly missing your Call-to-Action statement, or click-throughs to your other pages. They miss the chance of getting to know your brand better by reading/scanning the entire article you created for them.

How can you counteract the effects of SGE?

When it seems the search engines are making your job harder, you may feel like waving the white flag and giving up, but SEO is not dead and there are proven ways to get your site content seen in 2025.

“A study analyzing 1,000 commercial terms found that Google displayed a Search Generative element for 86.8% of all search queries.” – SEO.AI

• Optimize for Featured SGE Snippets: Since SGE provided featured snippets from different sites with the circular link icon, optimize your content for these placements. Structure your content with question headings and quick, concise and easy-to-understand answers. Ask questions that you know your audience is asking and get to the point fast. Adding an FAQ page or questions and answers on each page, can help you rank better on those featured snippets.
• Use Bulleted/Numbered Lists: It’s always a good idea to use lists, headings and subheadings to divide content into sections, making your content easy to read and easier to scan so the user can find what they are looking for quickly. That has not changed, but the importance of good content organization has increased making SGE’s job to grasp content easier.  

“Implementing content clusters can significantly reduce the time needed to rank for target keywords, with some reports showing a 50% reduction in ranking time compared to traditional content strategies.” – Power Digital

• Use Content Clusters: What is it? Content clusters are a group of web pages or posts that are organized around a single topic; by grouping related content around a central pillar page. Content clusters are also known as topic clusters or SEO pillars, and have shown to rank faster if organized well. This is why I tell people to organize their blog with post categories, so the user can easily get to the articles they’d be interested in when perusing your site. Now with the advent of SGE, it’s again another essential ingredient in staying relevant in the SEO world.

“Google and other search engines are increasingly integrating visual content like videos and images into search results, making video optimization crucial.” – Search Engine Land

• Adding Videos and Creating Infographics: Google loves presenting infographics that are relevant to a search query, so create an ORIGINAL one using Adobe products, Canva, PixelLab, Gimp, etc. And Google continues to promote content with embedded videos and/or Youtube videos on your site.  Research indicates that video can increase organic traffic from search engine results pages (SERPs) by 157%. 

“According to recent statistics, social media remains highly relevant for businesses, with a large majority, over 90% of businesses actively use social media for marketing purposes.” – WebFX

• Diversify your internet marketing channels: It’s time to get creative. Don’t underestimate social media platforms that still drive traffic to your site: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube and more. When you run modest ads on social media, you can increase eyes on your content exponentially, with a great return on investment. There are also forums and content aggregation sites where you can share content, participate in discussions, and connect with others who share similar interests across a wide range of topics. All of that said, do not give up on your organic onsite SEO strategies in lieu of these options.

TREND FOUR:  Updating Old Content is Now Just as Important as Creating New

Google will only rank relevant, fresh and dynamic content at the top of the SERPs, so it may be a good time to invest some of your content marketing time into a Spring Cleaning of your website pages and older posts. How long has it been since you’ve updated your pages? If the page has not been touched in more than a year, it might need some attention. Depending on the industry, it may be a good idea to review content every three to six months. How do you get started?

• Make a list and check it twice: Print out your page and post lists in chronological order, starting with the oldest first. Go through pages, posts, team profiles, case studies, landing pages, product pages, terms and disclaimers, privacy policy, and even form fields. Take your time, don’t do too much too soon, but create a strategy with a date spreadsheet so you can track how often and how long it’s been since the content has been updated.
• Review Front End Content: Take a few minutes to read over, update, edit, change, restructure layouts, add some new images/photos, add case studies, examples, and additional statistics and research. 
• Review Back End Content: Update meta titles and descriptions, review and update targeted keywords for that page/post as keywords trend over time. Update links (external and internal) to newer or updated pages on your own site as well as to additional credible external sources. Both types of links improve SEO value and user navigation. And of course, fix or remove broken links.

”We’ve increased the number of monthly organic search views of old posts we’ve optimized by an average of 106%. And we’ve more than doubled the number of monthly leads generated by the old posts we’ve optimized.” – Hubspot

Refreshing old content yields a higher ROI (return on investment), because you save time and revenue updating old content in comparison to the amount of time and money creating new content. So for less time (and time is money), you are increasing your leverage with the search engines by refreshing content rather than creating new.

• Review and Refresh: The world is constantly evolving, as is our product, services and our Brand Story, so don’t neglect the pages that have been working so hard for you all these months and years. Give them a facelift! Everytime you update a page, you ping the search engines to let them know the page content has been refreshed. The more pings … the more you get their attention … the higher you rank … the more visitors you receive … the higher your conversions. You get the point.
• Create a Schedule of Content Audits: If this seems overwhelming, let’s take it one page at a time. Make a schedule to refresh one or two pages a week on your site, as a steady consistent effort is a better SEO strategy than pushing out a flood of updates at once, which could actually temporarily hurt your ranking.
• Let it go … if Irrelevant: It’s hard to let go of old content, but if the topic of the page is no longer relevant, and there is no hope of reframing the article into a topic of valued user content, then ditch it. I say this with a great deal of caution because a page that is ranking continues to have a compounding effect over time, especially if the page had good traffic at one time. So do your best to recycle and refresh.
• Another time saver … repurpose content: Once that content’s makeover is complete, recycle, repurpose and reuse. Recycling content into other formats such as videos, podcasts, infographics, social media posts, email marketing, and traditional marketing not only saves marketing time and money, it creates a consistent brand message on your diverse marketing channels.

In Conclusion …

SEO continues to evolve but is still alive and thriving in 2025. Keep writing original content that your users (target audience) want to read, utilizing your experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness. Using AI can be a powerful tool in your hands as long as you don’t give that tool too much power over your brand message. Optimize content for zero-click searches and the new SGE experience with questions and quick concise answers, lists and content clusters. And what is old is new again … update, refresh and recycle old content for increased SEO value.

Need help? With nearly 30 years’ experience, a large portfolio of web design, logo & graphic design, content marketing, internet marketing training & consulting, we provide affordable, hands-on and user-friendly assistance in creating or enhancing your online presence for your brand.