Five SEO trends for 2024 and 2025 What’s New?
Victor Pan wrote in a HubSpot Slack thread, “I’m excited but tired by so many changes.” He then dropped six links to the latest AI news. He sounds like he needs a hug. He’s a product SEO here.
It makes sense. Even in the tech industry, where rapid changes are preferred, AI is significantly accelerating everything. AI-powered search engines like Perplexity are becoming more popular. SearchGPT is negotiating with publishers to prevent copyright issues, while your average SEO is struggling to keep up.
As a marketer, you should know about search trends. To get the inside news on these trends, I talked to SEOs at HubSpot and around the world.
But first, let’s go back to the 1990s and quickly look at how search has changed since then.
How things have changed in search
A whole generation has grown up never having known a time before Google.
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I talked to Mikkel deMib, an SEO from Denmark who has been doing SEO since before it was called SEO, to get a bigger picture of how search has changed over time.
“We called it’search engine positioning’ for the first few years,” he says. At that time, I was living and using the internet. It still makes me feel like a child reading a story about the past.
I ask deMib about some of the most important events in the last 25 years that might help me understand what the future of search holds. He remembers that the switch to mobile was first predicted around the year 2000, not long after wireless application protocol (WAP) made it possible for phones to connect to the internet.
“Of course it failed completely,” deMib says. “From a usability point of view, it was terrible.”
It took another ten years for Google to start putting mobile first and for content producers to start making their sites mobile-friendly. For now, deMib sees up to 90% mobile traffic in some verticals, like women’s fashion. This number probably doesn’t come as a surprise to HubSpot users.
How Search Has Changed in 2024
Rory Hope, Head of EN Growth at HubSpot, agrees with Pan that he is tired from being so excited.
“People in the business world talk a lot about how Google seems to be bouncing between different priorities,” he says. “The SEO community is under a lot of stress” because of this.
Pan looks at all of this AI-driven change over a longer period of time and warns marketers to focus on the basics of good content rather than trying to make it work with every new update.
He told me that “there was a time”—October 2015—when Google really pushed a new format called AMP. This is what I asked him about how SEOs were working out how to optimize for Google’s AI Overviews. Accelerated mobile pages were made to load faster on phones, and if this sounds familiar, it means that users could read material without going to the website.
Pan says, “AMP is now a dead project.” That is, we can’t know what will happen in the future, so let’s not worry about a world without clicks just yet.
Read on for even more expert tips and useful information on how to adapt to the new search age.
Trends
I’m being careful when I use the word “trends” here. Every SEO I talked to stressed how the changes they’re seeing are linked and warned me not to use the word “trend” (see above for Victor Pan’s prediction that Google AMPs would die soon).
And a lot of the SEO trends we saw in 2023 are still going strong.
So, here are five things that SEOs will be looking out for in 2024 and 2025.
1. AI
DeMib has encountered numerous challenges and obstacles in the field of SEO. He says that AI is a “fundamental shift in technology that is maybe as big—maybe even bigger—than the internet.”
AI isn’t so much an SEO trend as it is the technology that makes robots, search engines, Google’s AI Overviews, and other things possible. There is a lot of worry about AI Overviews (AIO), and everyone is trying to figure out what will happen if it stops people on Google’s search engine results page (SERP) instead of clicking through to websites.
A very large number of SEO professionals are making AI a key part of their overall plans.
After polling more than 100 SEO professionals in the U.S., 73% said they strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement “AI tools, features, or solutions are becoming an important part of my company’s SEO strategy.”
A lot of these SEOs use AI to do things like improve SERP results and make websites better for technical SEO. AI can also help you get things done faster; almost three-quarters of those who answered said they only use AI to save time.
Not sure how to begin? Here is a pro tip: HubSpot has a free app called AI Search Grader that quickly looks at your brand based on what your customers and prospects are seeing on AI search engines and then tells you what you can do to make it better.
2. Zero-Click Search
Depending on who you ask, the launch of Google’s AI Overviews in May 2024 transformed “zero-click search” from a theoretical concern to a real-life nightmare.
The phrase will probably be used a lot more after 2024, but it’s still unclear if we’ll actually live in a world with no clicks.
HubSpot polled SEO experts in the U.S., and only 6% said that Google’s AI Overviews were a direct threat to search traffic. And only 13% of those who answered chose generative AI apps as their biggest worry.
Only 2% of people think that changes to Google’s algorithms will cause search traffic to drop.
People who read this may remember when AOL was pretty much the same thing as “internet.” Before the year 2000, DeMib says, “the internet was made up of a lot of big sites like Yahoo! and AOL that ran more like portals.” To keep people on their site, they tried to give users everything they wanted.
It didn’t work for Yahoo! and AOL, and deMib thinks it won’t work for Google either.
“I don’t think anyone can give users everything. It’s not going to work. They will still want to buy things that can only be bought at a certain webshop. People want different points of view. They’re not going to read all of the news in one place.
DeMib also tells me about a study on zero-click that SparkToro CEO Rand Fishkin did. According to Fishkin, there has been a rise in both the number of searches and the number of searches that don’t require a click.
“Things are getting better,” deMib says. It’s not true that more people are leaving Google; the number of those leaving has stayed about the same. This study by Fishkin can be read in full on the SparkToro website.
And not all people believe that zero-click is the beginning of the end for SEO. “Do you want people to see your content or not?” Amanda Natividad, VP of Marketing at SparkToro, asked anyone on LinkedIn.
“When I tell you to make content that doesn’t get clicked on, it’s because you need to optimize for impressions,” she says. To make sure that people see your social media posts.
3. Follow-up Search Intent
Amanda Sellers says, “That doesn’t mean that’s the only search users will make,” even though the number of zero-click queries is going up.
Sellers is the Manager of EN Blog Strategy at HubSpot. She told me that follow-up searches are very important.
“Let’s say a user looks for something very basic, and the AI Overview gives them an answer.” That answer will make some people happy and make other people unhappy. For those who aren’t happy, what other searches will they do to make their trip even better?
Sellers says that the most important thing for content strategy in 2024 and 2025 is to guess what people will look for again. We should write content for our readers, not Google, in the end. (This is also what Google says, which is funny.)
4. Ranch-style SEO
In April 2024, Clearscope CEO Bernard Huang wrote a blog post called “Why Ranch-Style SEO is Your Future-Proof Content Strategy.” This post caused a stir in the SEO world. “Unlearn what you know about SEO” is the first thing it says.
It’s not as scary as it sounds. Huang says that publishers shouldn’t focus on long, detailed articles but instead should “disaggregate] content into precise, digestible pieces that strategically align with the user’s search journey.” In other words, change your SEO approach from “skyscraper” to “ranch-style.”
Huang gives three reasons why search will move toward ranch-style:
It adapts to the change from keyword-focused to topic-focused SEO.
It lessens the bad effects that creative AI has on the web.
As a ranking factor, it “partners” with first-hand knowledge.
This goes along with what Sellers said about follow-up search intent: A good content plan takes into account the questions your readers will have at each step of their journey.
5. Video SEO
There is already a specialty in video SEO, but this field will likely grow even more. Pan says that “consumers want to watch videos on their favorite platforms,” which might not be your website. To make that happen, you need to know how to optimize your videos for YouTube and how social media sites show native videos over directly hosted videos.
Sellers adds, “It’s more important than ever to think about how your audience searches for and consumes information when you’re writing content in this tough search landscape.”
Now that consumers have the tools and knowledge to study almost anything, more and more potential customers are going to YouTube. Rory Hope, Head of EN Growth at HubSpot, says it’s because they’re “looking for human perspectives on their pain points.”
Hope also says that there are more and more video carousels in Google’s search results, which is “part of its goal to serve more human-led perspectives for users.”
Hope says that all of this points to a key area for SEOs to work on.
“SEOs should monitor the search results pages for their selected keywords and topics to identify which ones feature video carousels.” They should then work with media teams to make videos that are relevant to the search terms and topics.”
How marketers are switching gears to prepare for the future of search
Search is no longer useful; searching lives on!
48% of those who answered HubSpot’s original survey said that AIO would increase search traffic in the next six months. This shows that SEOs are usually positive about Google’s AI Overviews and other generative AI search engines.
All of these trends have one thing in common: AI is transforming the search environment, SEO is still very much in use, and people are still crucial to search.
Over 75% of SEOs think that AI will be used by them in 2025.
When Google added a second “E” to E-A-T in late 2022, it was a clear message that writers should write for their readers, not Google. “Writing content isn’t about keywords.” It has to do with ideas and editorial points of view, says Sellers.
The first “E,” “expertise,” could possibly be faked by AI. But “experience”? Not so much.
To sum up, our experts say that marketers and SEOs should change their strategies to adapt to new search trends:
Write for people to read.
“Use AI for what it’s good at and human-led content for what it’s good at.”—Tiffany Sellers
“Everyone should play around with and get used to the new AI-based tools that are coming out now.”—Mikkel deMib
“Check the SERPs for your target keywords and topics to see which ones have video carousels, and then make videos that are related to those keywords and topics.”—Ray Hope
Improve your editorial views and the depth of your coverage of current events.
