Summary
In 2025, SEO will focus more on transforming your website into a brand. Google's algorithms are increasingly preferring brands, and this preference is supported by data showing a higher brand search volume tends to correlate with better SEO performance.
Traffic diversity is becoming crucial. Relying solely on one traffic source, such as SEO, is risky. I recommend exploring other channels like YouTube, social media, PPC, and email to improve your overall traffic mix and enhance your site's SEO outcomes.
User signals, such as click behavior and goal completion, will play a more significant role. It’s essential to ensure that visitors find what they're looking for on your site to reduce bounce rates and "pogo-sticking," which are negative signals for SEO.
Content remains vital, but links are becoming even more crucial. Due to the surge in AI-generated content, backlinks are a more reliable indicator for ranking, so focus on earning quality links.
AI search engines are emerging as significant competitors to Google, driven by better user experiences and direct answers to queries. This suggests AI SEO, which involves optimizing for AI-based search results, will become increasingly important.
AI content tools are advancing quickly, making content production more scalable and integrating seamlessly with websites to optimize content performance. Leveraging these tools can provide a competitive edge.
Affiliate marketers will find e-commerce and local lead generation more rewarding fields due to increasing SEO challenges with affiliate sites. These areas offer more stability and potential for growth given current SEO trends.
Despite mounting challenges, those who persevere in SEO will likely prosper. Historical patterns suggest that following major algorithm updates, competition weakens as many lose faith, creating opportunities for those who adapt.
Video
How To Take Action
I’d suggest starting by transforming your website into a brand. You can do this by boosting brand search volume through different channels like social media or YouTube. By creating content that talks about your brand, people search for your business over time, helping you become more recognizable in Google’s eyes.
Next, focusing on traffic diversity is important. Don’t just rely on SEO for visitors. Mix it up with YouTube videos, social media posts, and email newsletters. This variety not only increases your audience but helps improve your SEO ranking.
Another important thing is to pay attention to user behavior on your site. Make sure your website is easy to navigate and that visitors can find what they need quickly. This reduces bounce rates, which can hurt your search rankings.
Content creation is still vital, but links are becoming even more crucial. Work on earning quality backlinks by sharing engaging and valuable content that others want to link to. You can also engage with seasonal trends to create content that gets noticed and linked by others.
Last, consider exploring AI SEO. As AI search engines grow, optimizing for these can give you an edge. Learning and adapting to this change can keep you competitive.
By working on these areas, your business should establish a stronger online presence while adapting to SEO changes in 2025.
Quotes by Author
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> #### "Traffic diversity gets cranked up as a ranking Factor"
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> #### "AI search engines will start to significantly steal market share from Google"
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> #### "Despite SEO getting harder and harder the folks that stick around will continue to make more and more money"
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Full Transcript
seon 2025 is going to be insanely different than it's ever been before why because based on my data Trend spotting and experience as I was planning this video I realized that my 2025 predictions were so freaking weird I thought I was tripping so just to make sure I was still sane I decided to crowdsource what you the community thought was going to happen next year and what I found is that a lot of very smart people feel exactly the same it's getting weird in this video I'll share with you my top 12 predictions on how SEO is going to change and most importantly what you can do to prepare we're going to talk a lot about AI the most important new ranking signals to focus on the huge Market gaps and opportunities that are open right now antitrust lawsuits the Fatal small website Publishers and your mom but real quick I want to let you know that my SEO agency the search initiative has $1,000 off discount going on till the end of the month to get a free audit head on over to the search initiative.com and put your details into the form and we'll let you know what we can do for you now back to the video all right let's get this party started discussing the ranking factors that you need to focus on in 25 especially in comparison to previous years SEO prediction number one turning your website into a brand becomes the new Focus SEO Publications have been saying for years that you should focus on trading your website as a brand that part isn't new what is new is that SEO professionals are proving with actual data that Google is indeed preferring Brands these days and more importantly they're also proving how Google is deciding if a website is a brand or another Rinky Dink SEO cash grab this correlation study showed that helpful content update winner had a larger ratio of brand search versus backlinks which I agreed with and many of you the community agreed too now I'm not trying to downplay our bagate like observation skills but it's quite obvious I mean just look at the search result for best testosterone supplements my ass used to rank number one for this keyword now it's only Mega Brands like WebMD in my opinion the main factor that Google uses to determine if a website is a brand or not is brand search volume are people actually searching for Matt digity Matt digity affiliate lab review and Matt digity net worth come on guys in fact here's the traffic graph for one of my affiliate sites that I sent don't try this at home fake bot traffic to in fact that's the only thing we did and Bam in the August core update traffic went up I have a video coming out on how to do this so make sure to subscribe that said in my opinion the best way to generate brand search volume is to go multi-channel with your traffic which brings me to my next SEO prediction for 2025 traffic diversity gets cranked up as a ranking Factor seo's sole traffic source is becoming less reliable for certain typ of websites so it makes sense to diversify by getting traffic from places like video email social media and PPC and what many smart people have realized is that when you have activity on other channels you actually get a better result with your SEO when the Yandex leak hit the internet Yandex is the Russian search engine that's very similar to Google we found that if the percentage of traffic you get from search engines is too high that can be viewed as a negative ranking Factor my favorite place to diversify my traffic is YouTube clearly if you need help getting started with YouTube check out my Done For You video agency epic video I also love PPC but only if you can generate profitable campaigns PPC also has the bonus effect of generating brand search volume and surprise I also have an agency that can help you out with PPC digity media my next SEO prediction is that Google will rely more on user signals in its algorithm Google actually always has said that they don't use click data but oops just kidding guys the Google code leak actually had a specific module called nav boost that was entirely focused on click signals the user signal I think they considered most is goal completion when users click on your website are they getting their goals met did you end their search Journey or do they click back on their browser and pogo stick down to the next result a very bad user signal some of you guys also think that shorter 2 to three minute long articles are preferred by today's algorithm a theory I can get behind prediction number four content and links Remain the core ranking signals in SEO but the value of content goes down and the value of links goes up Google is getting absolutely flooded with AI content according to this article from earthweb 7.5 million blog posts are published per day wow and with everyone in their Grandma now able to spam out content with the Press of a button to save money analyzing it all Google will do what they've always done rely more heavily on links to decide whether content is good or not now moving on to the topic of AI my next prediction is that AI search engines will start to significantly steal market share from Google like Channel viewer Chris my bet is also on search GPT I mean it's just a better search experience you get your question answered right away instead of getting a list of 10 places where you might find your answer mostly Reddit I might add and there's no ads for now plus it's run by open AI whose adoption rate track record puts a p didy freak off to shame to add Google's recent loss in the antitrust hearings makes them vulnerable to disruption and if users start switching over to AI search engines that brings me to my next prediction AI SEO is going to become a thing that is optimizing your website to appear in AI search results now I'll be the first to admit that so far I'm a new bit getting optimized for search GPT but I'm running a lot of tests and so far it's working I'll make a video on this when I've locked down the process so subscribe so you don't miss it by the way here's a quick word from the sponsor of this video search intelligence this campaign got us big links in websites such as Life Hacker Welles Online daily record and about 20 other news websites let me show you how we've done it we knew that people will be flying a lot this summer and we knew that journalists will be writing about this topic a lot so on behalf of our client we put together a nice guide about how to fall asleep on the plane then we use mrack to find journalists who write about travel then we put our advice in a nice email and send the tips to the journalists within just a few days the links started Landing securing our client natural placements in really big websites just like this this and this this is a great example about how you can leverage seasonal Trends to earn links to a website anticipate what journalists want to write about at all times and give them the the stories that they need they will reward you with some great juicy links I hope this is helpful now back to the video next prediction AI overviews will be completely rolled out by the end of 2025 in a knee-jerk reaction to the launch of chat GPT Google came out hard AF with AI overviews and the search results but they soon recalled the hell out of that move when people started noticing hallucinations like when you Google I'm feeling depressed and they recommend you jump off the Golden Gate Bridge which would certainly solve the depression but come on now that that said these embarrassing screw-ups are getting fewer and farther between these days so I'm guessing by Q2 Q3 2025 we'll be back with AI answers being bukkaked all over the internet I mean we wouldn't want to send traffic to actual websites would we informational queries like are strawberries good for you how to set up a webcam or is SEO dead these keywords are screwed in any display ad informational content sites that happen to live past the helpful content update Purge yeah those are unfortunately a ticking Time Bomb so my suggestion for you is the following focus on B bot of the funnel keywords and massive CR to get the most out of the search volume next prediction AI content continues to perform well and content scalability hits another level yes last year open AI said that it's mathematically impossible for AI detectors to quote reliably distinguished between AI generated and human generated content but even if it were detectable Google's own search guidance about AI content says they'll reward high quality content however it's produced and as a result people are printing ing websites with AI and spouting massive traffic boners despite what SEO Twitter wants to believe but my SEO prediction along with my buddy Neils is that AI content generation will evolve into the following rather than Crea an article you just add your website details the software will figure out the best content that you could possibly rank for write it for you update old and stale content and all you really need to do is set your daily spend I know one company that's already working on this Surfer next prediction is a two-parter the good news I think Reddit is going to to lose traffic in 2023 redddit got the biggest traffic boner ever to rise because Google gave them page one rankings for well just about every keyword but clever seos quickly found out that gaming Reddit by buying up votes is the easiest ever Reddit as a user experience is dead it now and Google's going to have to take some SEO love away from their sweetheart the bad news the other Mega sites that rank for all the keywords that Reddit doesn't rank for I think are going to get even more traffic Google loves Brands Google loves backlinks sites like the New York Times has e like Diddy has baby oil okay okay I'll stop with the DD jokes maybe next prediction content sites particularly content focused websites that monetize with affiliate and display ads are unfortunately still going to be extremely hard to rank this all kicked off during the September 2023 helpful content update that seemed to particularly go after these types of sites much to the detriment of Google's actual search result quality as a reaction SEO Twitter rightfully protested the unfair Devastation it had on small Publishers it got Google's attention and in the August 2024 core update release notes they say that the update quote takes into account the feedback we've heard from some creators and others over the past few months and they quote aim to connect people with a range of highquality sites including small or independent sites that are creating useful original content but what are their big recoveries did things get better for Content sites not really I mean my portfolio had a couple recoveries of 10 to 20% but it was random AF the site that I did the most work on barely moved that said there's sites like house fresh that did a lot better but this begs the question did house fresh recover just because they were one of the loudest on social media honestly who knows but what I do know is that this algorithmic gesture for small Publishers was cute if anything and it's probably a sign of things to come that being said there is a silver lining behind all of this and that's my next prediction affiliate seos will diversify into the greener pastures of e-commerce and local lead generation hell that's what I've done already it's my belief that affiliate SEO is the hardest category of SEO that there is hear me out the barrier to entry is nothing startup cost nothing anyone can register a domain get it hosted install WordPress and start reviewing products combine this with the uncapped income ceiling of the affiliate model and you have a perfect storm of attracting hungry motivated and skilled seos making affiliate SEO competitive as hell but with Google currently blocking the business model what are these SEO Killers going to do probably what I've been doing this whole year diversifying into e-commerce and Lead gen it's been freaking great compared to affiliate I'm not going to lie this is easy right now it's a gold rush so if you're looking looking to diversify this is where I'd start and I'd start soon next prediction despite SEO getting harder and harder the folks that stick around will continue to make more and more money I've been doing SEO since 2009 and there's this very predictable pattern that always happens people do their SEO rank websites get clients make money then Google drops an algorithmic bomb and many people get knocked on their asses a lot of these people quit SEO forever but the people that stick around figure out the new way of doing things and there's less competition now because so many people left this this is the SEO golden age and we're about to enter another one that's what Diddy said thanks for watching make sure to subscribe to be part of the SEO golden age
