Summary
- In 2025, prepare for less organic traffic due to AI overviews and ads on Google. Despite this, Google remains the best source for organic traffic compared to social media platforms.
- Expect more AI overviews for commercial and local queries. While these might reduce clicks, Google citing its sources can lessen impact on organic traffic.
- Advertisements will likely appear in AI overviews, as Google prioritizes advertisers. Begin thinking about integrating your strategies to include advertising here.
- Alternative search engines like Search GPT and Perplexity may rise as competitors to Google. Adapt and optimize for new search engines and technologies to stay relevant.
- Understanding Natural Language Processing (NLP) is crucial for SEO success. Use NLP to optimize content for platforms like Google and YouTube, boosting your brand's visibility.
- Google's market share will remain over 85% in traditional search. Despite changes, Google won't easily lose its dominance in the search engine market.
- Google may reduce visibility of lower-quality content in search results, like outdated forum threads. Focus on high-quality and up-to-date content to maintain ranking.
- Website and brand authority will continue to be vital for SEO. Having consistent backlinks and branded searches can help establish trust and improve performance.
- SEO agencies need to expand their services to include broader marketing strategies like conversion rate optimization. This approach is essential to thrive in the evolving digital landscape.
Video
How To Take Action
Implementation Strategies for Small Businesses, Entrepreneurs, or Personal Growth:
Adapt to Lower Organic Traffic: I would suggest focusing on creating high-quality, updated content. Stay relevant by frequently publishing well-researched and unique articles. This helps counteract the predicted decrease in organic clicks from Google.
Embrace AI and Ads: A smart way to stay ahead is to start exploring advertising options that might appear within AI overviews. This ensures visibility even as Google prioritizes ads.
Diversify SEO Efforts: Optimize not just for Google but also for upcoming search engines like Search GPT and Perplexity. Be adaptable and understand various search engines' optimization techniques to broaden your reach.
Harness NLP: Use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to improve content for better visibility on Google and YouTube. Create content that fills in topic gaps and adds unique insights to stand out in search results.
Strengthen Brand Authority: Focus on building website and brand authority. Consistently aim for quality backlinks and encourage branded searches to establish trust with search engines.
Expand Marketing Strategies: SEO isn’t just about search anymore. Add broader marketing tactics like conversion rate optimization. This ensures high traffic also leads to conversions.
- Stay Consistent: Continuously acquire backlinks and increase branded searches. This helps maintain a trustworthy site and achieve sustained SEO performance.
By following these strategies, you can effectively prepare for the digital landscape of 2025, ensuring your business or personal brand thrives amid the changes.
Quotes by Author
"SEO prediction number one is less organic clicks"
"Google is still the best organic traffic source"
"Search GPT and perplexity will be viable alternatives to Google"
"SEO practitioner should be adaptable and willing to optimize for any search engine"
"Website and brand Authority will continue to be the most important ranking Factor"
Full Transcript
will SEO change in 2025 in this video I'll share seven predictions based on my decade of experience in this industry I'm Nathan gotch the founder of gotch SEO Academy and rankability and the author of The SEO entrepreneur so if you want to stay on The Cutting Edge of SEO watch this entire video and tell me you're excited by liking it let's get right into it so SEO prediction number one is less organic clicks so Google is trying to take clicks away from websites through AI overviews excessive ads that push the organic results down and Sur features that exclude traditional serps you should prepare for Less organic search traffic even if your rankings are solid but even with reduced clicks Google is still the best organic traffic source for example getting clicks to your website on platforms like X or LinkedIn is very difficult you can't just drop a link in your social media content because the platforms will punish you and reduce your reach so in comparison Google is still the best and you can use Google search console to measure your organic clicks and CTR SEO prediction number two is more AI overviews So currently most AI overviews are for informational longtail queries however I expect Google to expand this to include commercial and local queries but if Google continues to site its sources in the AI overviews I don't believe it's going to be super damaging to organic traffic because they're very similar to featured Snippets but I do have anecdotal evidence when I've already found myself reading an AI overview and not clicking through especially on mobile but this will vary dramatically depending on the query but never forget humans do like to take the path of lease resistance even if the information may be inaccurate so SEO prediction number three is ads in the AI overviews so Google will always prioritize its advertisers above all else so it's very likely that you'll be able to advertise within the AI overviews it's only a matter of time SEO prediction number four is that search GPT and perplexity will be viable alternatives to Google so this is the first time in Google's long dominant history that they might have some competition but we just don't know how good search GPT will be but it can change the game if it integrates well within chat gbt but don't fear this change it is called SEO not Google SEO and SEO practitioner should be adaptable and willing to optimize for any search engine you must learn how to optimize for large language models and modern search engines like search GPT or perplexity going forward now I won't get into it here but traditional digital marketing is the key because both platforms crawl the internet to deliver answers so the more visibility your brand has online the more likely you'll show up in the results and that means having a firm understanding of natural language processing or NLP will also help you drive visibility because these llms use NLP to understand content okay so I want to give you two quick examples of why you should be thinking about using NLP to not just optimize for SEO in Google but also using it to optimize for SEO on other platforms as well so the first example is SEO for dentist so as you can tell got SEO is ranking for this keyword but that's actually not the part I want to show you the part I want to show you is if we scroll down you're actually going to see that I'm also ranking here okay and I've actually done this again on this keyword as well which is SEO tools for agencies which is very competitive once again ranking number one and then going down here and actually have two different rankings here in YouTube now here's where this part this is where this really comes into play okay so what I do now uh is I will use the NLP to create the blog post or the SEO asset first for Google and then I'll take that same NLP optimized content and write my YouTube script with it with it as well so what happens on YouTube is when you publish a new video the first thing that happens is YouTube crawls the transcript it it crawls that script and tries to see what the video is about and when I say crawl what it's doing is it's using NLP to understand what this video is about so then it can push it out to the most relevant audience possible so this is the technology that Google and YouTube and Amazon and x and Linkedin they're all using NLP or nlu which is natural language understanding to ultimately it quite literally understand human language okay that's what the purpose of the technology is and so you can use this technology to your advantage to basically feed these algorithms exactly what they're looking for so just to give you an idea this is the actual blog post that I created for SEO tools for agencies and you can see I used rankability to actually build this and as you can tell you know optimal score 71 I've got a 71 and if you look go and take a look you know at number one here um I'm beating some very powerful websites very powerful websites I'm beating back link which is one of the most powerful websites in the entire SEO industry okay and you can go down the list search engine journal and you know all these powerful websites that I'm beating and the reason is there's a few reasons number one is it's optimized for NLP it's also uh tapping into what's called Information Gain okay it's another thing and I won't go too deep into that here but basically what I'm doing when I'm trying to optimize a piece of content is I'm trying to fill in all the gaps right I'm trying to fill in all the the topic gaps in the content but then I also want to see a little bit of Whit space in here okay A little bit of Whit space is actually good because if you see some Whit space it means that you're talking about stuff that no one else is talking about okay and that's really really important you want to bring something new to that keyword and so I'm always looking for ways to add uniqueness to the content and you'll see there's a bunch of areas in this blog post post where I'm talking about things where no one else has talked about those things but the point is you can take this exact beautiful blog post you know that you create and then you can repurpose it on YouTube and get a very very similar outcome so people just don't do this and and it's incredibly effective as I showed you here it works very very well so take advantage of it and this brings me to SEO prediction number five which is that Google's market share in the traditional search Market will continue to be more than 80 5% and the truth is that Google isn't going down without a fight they also have nearly unlimited resources to counter their competitors's moves and now SEO prediction number six is that Google will turn the dial down on ugc related search results like forums so Google search results are loaded with outdated forums and thin Reddit threads and if Google cares about the quality of its search results it'll turn the dial down on this SEO prediction number six is that website and brand Authority will continue to be the most important ranking Factor so at this point anyone can create decent content with large language models like CH gbt so Google needs a way to filter through all the noise and determine what should Rank and this is why website Authority via backlinks and branded searches will continue to be critical for long-term performance on the backlink side you must acquire backlinks consistently every single month but that's not all you also need branded searches and strong user signals on your website otherwise the backlinks look super sketchy according to a study by Moz there's a correlation between brand Authority and backlinks regarding SEO performance and that means that websites with backlinks and brand Authority survive Google algorithm updates while the opposite is true a lack of branded searches May signal to Google that your website isn't trustworthy and a traditional content marketing strategy can be used to get more branded searches that means you'll publish content across many platforms inspiring some of your audience to perform branded searches on Google and this is one of the biggest reasons traditional affiliate driven blogs will struggle without a brand going forward so one of my favorite affiliate websites on the Internet is ratings go ahead and just spend a little bit of time looking at their content because it's pretty insane they're literally using like scientific methods to test this Hardware okay they are really taking it to the next level they're this is basically testing in a laboratory all right so this isn't some you know affiliate content where they went on to Amazon and just regurgitated the reviews this is a serious serious operation that's occurring here so if you're going to be doing affiliate SEO this is how you have to operate but the thing I really want to show you is if we actually go to the keywords you can see something super cool which is their number one keyword the keyword that drives the most traffic for them is actually their brand name okay so this is really really important because if you have a huge link profile there should also be a significant amount of branded search traffic coming into your website otherwise it looks incredibly sketchy so going forward make sure that your your referring domains and your branded searches are growing at the same speed and finally SEO prediction number seven is that there will be fewer purist SEO agencies so being 100% focused on SEO as an agency a few years ago was definitely useful but to keep up with the times SEO agencies that will Thrive will also offer broader search marketing strategy that includes organic and paid search and will'll also like cons consider adding conversion rate optimization the truth is driving traffic isn't enough you also need it to convert so I recommend every agency add this to their skill set so if you want better SEO results in 2025 check out my next video which is the most comprehensive SEO checklist on YouTube thanks for watching
