Search engine optimisation continues to evolve, and your business needs to adapt to stay ahead. Here’s how you can adopt innovative SEO practices.
From Google’s November 2024 core update to the extra E added to Google’s E-A-T content guidelines in 2022 and a myriad of updates in between, search engine optimisation (SEO) never stands still. Add advancements in technology, the rise of AI, and ongoing shifts in user behaviour to the mix, and it’s clear that businesses must continually adopt innovative strategies to remain visible and relevant in search engine results.
Here’s how SEO is changing and how your business can ensure it gets noticed in all the right ways—by both search engines and customers.
One of the biggest changes in SEO is the shift towards user intent rather than just keywords. The days of keyword stuffing, irrelevant keywords, or creating pages for all variations of high-value keywords are long gone as the search engine now focuses on delivering results that best match what users are actually looking for rather than simply matching search terms. This evolution has led to the rise of more sophisticated algorithms that understand context, semantics, intent, and user engagement signals.
In 2025, your SEO strategies must align with this shift. You need to focus on providing high-quality, relevant content that satisfies Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines that demand Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) rather than just stuffing keywords into webpages. This is where a valuable resource like Viaduct Generation’s SEO services can make all the difference, as they include keyword research, optimising on-page elements, and ensuring your content is engaging and informative. In doing so, your website has the advantage, and this will reflect in your rankings.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has also become pivotal in shaping SEO, as search engines are using AI to understand and rank content better than ever before. Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) update and its evolving use of AI have made it essential for businesses to create content that answers users' queries in a more natural, conversational manner.
Additionally, AI-powered tools can help your business to optimise its website for better search performance by offering insights into search trends and customer behaviour, and providing automated content generation capabilities.
For the last few years, it’s been predicted that this will be the year of voice search. 2025 may well be the year this finally happens, as it’s predicted that around 8.4 billion voice assistants will be used worldwide, and 20.5% of internet users are already relying on them. Plus, over 13% of the population is using smart speakers for online shopping, highlighting how they are becoming part of our everyday routines.
With this ever-growing number of people using smartphones and voice-activated devices like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, your business must fully optimise its website for these searches. However, this requires a different approach to traditional on-site SEO, as voice queries are typically more conversational and need to be optimised for natural language and long-tail keywords.
Multimodal search, which allows users to interact with search engines using a combination of inputs, such as text or voice queries paired with images, is growing in popularity, too. To accommodate this, your site’s image metadata must be descriptive, its video transcripts and captions accurate, and all alt text must be optimised to align with search intent and accessibility standards.
If your business can work this into its SEO strategy, it will boost its authority and enjoy an increase in rankings overall.
Google’s algorithm started prioritising user experience (UX) in 2021, and the focus has become even greater in the last few years. In 2025, user experience (UX) is intrinsically intertwined with technical SEO, and a website that offers a seamless, fast, and intuitive experience for the greatest number of users is rewarded with better rankings.
To maximise the potential of your UX, you need to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly, as Google’s mobile-first indexing will penalise you otherwise. Your site needs to be responsive and load quickly, and your images and video must be optimised to facilitate this.
Accessibility also factors into search engine rankings, and you should include screen reader compatibility, alt image text, colour contrast, and other tools and features to cater to as large an audience as possible. The more you can accommodate all kinds of users, the more favourable your site becomes in the search engine’s eyes.
Your SEO strategy can make or break your business. It’s what gets you noticed, keeps you visible online, attracts new customers, and keeps loyal ones returning.
While it can be a challenge to keep up, with the expertise of an award-winning digital agency like Viaduct Generation, you’ve got access to advanced SEO solutions. This allows you to maximise your reach and stay competitive in a digital world that keeps on turning.
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21 January 2025
10 January 2025
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