SEO Is Changing In 2025 – Here’s What You Need To Know

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was once all about keywords and finding ways to trick the algorithm into showing your website to as many people as possible – but that won’t work anymore. SEO in 2025 now focuses on the quality of the content and website, meeting Google’s new E-E-A-T guidelines, and maximizing your content for Google’s SGE (search generative experience). 

 How Has AI Has Impacted SEO?

These new standards are related directly to the growth of AI. Not only because of Google’s use of AI to provide their consumers with answers to their search queries, but also because of the increase in use of AI to write content. 

Google (and other search engines) do not want to show their users bad quality content, and let’s be honest. AI has not really met the mark. You can absolutely tell when something was written by AI, and the content is not always correct. This means these search engines do not want to push out this type of content, hence why the E-E-A-T guidelines were created.

What are Google’s new guidelines: E-E-A-T?

 

Google has created these guidelines to easily explain to businesses how to keep their websites up to standard and shown to their target audience. Let’s go through each letter.

• Experience: Does your website demonstrate the experience, and that you know what you are talking about? AI does not have experience, but you do. Including content on your website that shows how you have experience in the subject matter will help your content get shown. A great way to demonstrate this is to add on your website how many years you’ve been in business.
• Expertise: Are you an expert in your field? Experience and Expertise relate to one another. Google wants to make sure that you know what you’re talking about, and that the information you are sharing is correct and relevant. Having an About Us page on your website, or having an About The Author section of an article, can help you display your knowledge.
• Authoritativeness: Are you known as a go to source for the information you share? This can be done multiple ways, but a common strategy is backlinks.

What are backlinks?

When another website or webpage links back to your website, that’s a backlink. Backlinks demonstrate that your website is reputable and filled with quality content. They are a wonderful tool for SEO strategies.

Believe it or not, but social media can also help you demonstrate your authoritativeness. Many search engines, including Google, are now also showing social media content along with their search results. A good social media presence can also display authoritativeness and get your content at the top of the search results.

• Trustworthiness: Have you ever been on a website that was not well built, looked fake, and made you uncomfortable? You probably immediately clicked off of it. Search engines do not want to show spammy websites, so it’s important to make sure your website is good quality.
  • • For example, if you sell products on your website, but have no information about how people can get in contact with customer service if something goes wrong – this makes your website look sketchy. 
    • Even small mistakes can make your website look untrustworthy. It is important to keep everything up to date and to fix any mistakes or issues you may have.

How does SGE fit into search engine optimization?

Before we can answer this question, we first need to explain what SGE is. In 2024 Google introduced their Search Generative Experience, or SGE. Google now takes your search query, scours the internet, and uses AI to construct their own response to your query to be displayed at the top of the search results. To the right of this response, Google displays the webpages they pulled the information from. 

This has led to an increase in zero click searches, meaning people are not clicking on any webpages when they use Google search, because the answer is displayed to them automatically.

 

Does this mean no one is going to see my small business’s website?

Not necessarily, but it has become harder. While SEO and keywords are still very important for the all mighty Google to be willing to show your information, it does not guarantee that people will actually visit your website. The best way to try to increase your visibility is to create content relevant enough to be part of the SGE response to a search query. This way your website will be listed to the right of the response.

 

Creating good quality content is always your best bet, but there are some ways you can format your content so that it is easily pulled by the AI system:

 

• Answer common questions your audience wants answered.
• Structure your content so that it is easy to extract information (i.e. bullet points like this).
• Having question based headings clearly demonstrate the information being shared.
• Having clear concise answers make it easy for Google to simply copy and paste information into the SGE response.
• Answering multiple questions on one page can help increase your chances of your information being pulled for a search query.
• High quality content will ALWAYS be top priority, and shared above all else.

In the past, SEO was a game of tricking the algorithm and simply using keywords to rank at the top. This will no longer work, and small businesses should focus on creating quality content and keeping their websites up to date. SEO is a long term game to be continuously worked on. If you’re looking for a quick and easy SEO checklist for your small business’s website, you can check out the FREE download we created here.

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