Future-Proofing SEO: Expert Insights on 2025 Trends & Best Practices by Stephen Pitts, Vizion

1. What are the biggest emerging SEO trends that businesses should be preparing for in 2025 and beyond?

I think the biggest trend in search is the possibility that Google may not continue to drive traffic as they have historically over the past two decades. The movement of the search experience over the past few years will continually be influenced by artificial intelligence and machine learning. The ideal way to deal with this is to focus on EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and Brand marketing. Reaching your audience continues to increase in complexity, whether it be through visual search, voice search, video, interactive content, or whatever is around the corner, figuring out where they are and what they engage with will be valuable to continued success in digital marketing.

2. How can businesses ensure that their SEO strategies align with evolving search engine algorithms?

Focus on your current audience or the audience you are trying to reach. User intent drives what is seen in search results, so understanding what people expect to see in the result for particular queries is what you need to provide to effectively rank and convert them when they reach your content. Contextual relationships with topics and brand relevance for these topics will be the key to continuing to rank, whether it be AI driven or keyword searches in traditional search engines or generative engines. To do this effectively, brands will need to leverage structured data that ties their content to their entity, helping the algorithms and AI to understand why your content is valuable for the person searching.

3. What are the biggest challenges brands face in local vs. global SEO strategies?

Localization will continue to limit traditional global SEO strategies because if it is relevant to a local company, search engines will likely provide them within search results more favorably because they are more relevant or apparent to a person in a particular location. This will make it harder for global brands to rank competitively across markets unless they have a known footprint, relevancy or awareness for a localized result. Local businesses that are leveraging location-based content and signals (e.g., Google Business Profiles, Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Maps) have an advantage over these larger organizations’ higher authority signals that have historically helped them rank highly across the majority of search.

4. How should brands balance organic SEO efforts with paid search strategies for maximum ROI?

Understanding that SEO is not simply an acquisition channel, it provides awareness and can help brands gain traction that then can be converted through paid search can help you improve your return on ad spend. Additionally, leveraging high performing keywords in paid search to inform content strategies for organic search can help you increase your return by widening your funnel; what are the non-brand topics that are driving a lower cost per acquisition in paid that can be targeted in organic to reach them higher up in the funnel and turn to lower cost brand searches in paid. To find a balance, it is necessary to evaluate the blended ROI of all your marketing channels to find the right balance, no single channel is an island and there is value in being in all of the ones that your audience engages with.

5. What are the best practices for businesses to future-proof their SEO strategies against constant algorithm updates?

If you are producing content that is relevant, highlights your topical expertise and experience you will gain trust in your brand. Maintaining the experience on your site (navigation, UX/UI and performance) and making it easier to complete the desired task or find an answer will reinforce the purpose of your site to users and engines. If your brand earns this engagement and you can maintain it, your brand demand will increase, and you will prove to search engines that you should be included in results relevant to your brand. The easiest way to future-proof your strategy is to focus on what the engines are trying to do, deliver the most relevant results for a request based on the intent of the person making the request.

6. What impact will zero-click searches and AI-generated answers have on SEO strategies?

The short answer is less traffic, especially for informational queries. People will continue to search for these, and it will still be important for brands to have content that is relevant to these topics, because it shows
what brands and sites have expertise and authority for them. If you simply want to increase traffic, identifying other areas of the SERP like “no answer” queries, local search, people also asked, image results, product results, etc. that are present for keywords that have high demand will help your brand continue to stand out even if the result isn’t driving traffic to your website.

Key Takeaways – search engines will continue to award traffic to websites that focus on the user, leverage multi-format content that provide value. My recommendation is to ensure that SEO is part of your holistic marketing strategy, build owned assets and increase your engagement with the community where your brand operates. You can invest in tools, such as AI, to do this more efficiently, but effective content, analysis and engagement comes from human oversight and understanding.