Every modern business can benefit a lot from going online. That said, business owners should use SEO to show up in search and generate interest in whatever products or services they are selling. The SEO landscape changes every year and, since 2023, a drastic shift has been underway thanks to generative AI. Here you’ll find enduring SEO trends that will stay relevant in 2025 and beyond.
Video SEO is Still Relevant
First, online business owners should recognize how video content is (and will continue to be) dominant throughout the rest of the 2020s. Take social media as an example – early social media sites were forums and other platforms where users made text-based posts. Throughout the 2010s, they developed to become multimedia platforms offering image and video content.
Today, there are bustling social media and video-sharing sites that savvy entrepreneurs can use to market themselves. There are also entire business models that offer video content as a service, best seen with table game livestreams at iGaming sites. Those streams allow players to try live casino gambling hosted by a real human being, for games like blackjack, but also game shows made specifically for the internet. As digital entertainment develops, there will be even more business models built around visual content in the future. In the meantime, videos will remain a surefire way to market to people online.
For video SEO, marketers should focus keyword analytics on YouTube or the social media site they’re focusing on. Videos can be promotional or informational, like tutorials on how to use a product or service. They should also be accompanied by metadata, descriptions, alt text, and transcripts, which can all get more mileage out of keywords. There’s also a creative element to video production – they need to be entertaining and have thumbnails worth clicking on.
Get Familiar with Search Generative Experience
If you’ve used Google’s search recently, you may have noticed its AI overview feature. This is Search Generative Experience (SGE) and it summarizes a search that can be answered with a concise answer or explanation. It will only become more advanced with time, relative to generative AI advancements. Every AI overview is accompanied by source links, so SEO experts can still optimize for this new feature and get to the top of search results pages.
Methods for SGE optimization are still experimental, but AI overviews can make informational content more powerful than ever. Conventional wisdom stated that online businesses can become more powerful by creating blogs filled with informational content, establishing themselves as an authority source in their industry. With AI overview, those pages can get plucked by Google’s AI to answer user queries.
Optimize for Answers with AEO
The use of AI chatbots in search hints at a broader trend, something that has been dubbed Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). Depending on who is asked, AEO will either be an offshoot or the sequel to SEO, as the internet repositions itself around AI info aggregators instead of traditional search engines. The reality will be somewhere in the middle, hence Google embracing AI features.
That’s why SEO experts should start looking at AEO, targeting informational queries by providing accurate and concise on your site’s pages. It’s common for info pages to include a FAQ section to provide useful insights – marketers should double down with those and pad them with enough detail to satisfy more complex, conversational searches, among other AEO strategies.
These three trends will stick around throughout 2025 and beyond. Marketers should incorporate them into their online marketing strategy, to capitalize on the new ways that users are digesting information online.
