SEO in 2025: where we’re focusing, and what we’re leaving out
Our SEO priorities for 2025, from Core Web Vitals and first-hand content to citable answers for AI search, plus what we’re doing less of and why.
Search looks different at the start of 2025. AI Overviews sit above the results for many informational queries, ChatGPT search and Perplexity answer questions with cited sources, and GA4 is now the only version of Google Analytics. Our priorities for the year follow from that: sound foundations, fewer and better pages, and measurement that tells the truth.
What has changed going into 2025
Four shifts shape this year’s plan:
- AI Overviews appear above the organic results for many informational queries and link to the pages they draw on. Google doesn’t publish how those sources are chosen, so be wary of anyone who promises you a place in them.
- ChatGPT search and Perplexity answer questions directly and cite web pages. Microsoft Copilot grounds its answers in Bing’s search index, which makes Bing worth more attention than most plans give it.
- INP is a Core Web Vital. It replaced FID in March 2024, so pages now have to respond quickly to clicks, taps and key presses, not just load quickly.
- Universal Analytics is gone. It stopped processing data in July 2024. GA4 is the baseline, and what used to be called conversions are now key events.
Our seven priorities
1. Technical foundations and Core Web Vitals
Everything else depends on search engines being able to crawl, render and index your pages, so that is where we start. Then come Core Web Vitals, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP within 200 ms and CLS of 0.1 or less. In our audits, INP is often the metric that needs the most work, usually because of heavy JavaScript and third-party tags. It’s why every SEO programme we run begins with a full audit.
2. Content that shows first-hand experience
Google added “experience” to its quality rater guidelines in December 2022, and its helpful content signals are now part of the core ranking systems. A page that summarises what already ranks has little to add. We’re steering budgets towards material only you can produce: your own data, worked examples, photos of real jobs, and authors who know the subject. Our content strategy work starts from what your team knows, not from a keyword list.
3. Being a quotable source for AI answers
How AI assistants choose their sources isn’t public, so we focus on what we can observe and control. First, access: make sure robots.txt, your CDN and your firewall don’t block Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. In our log reviews, many AI crawlers fetch HTML without running JavaScript, so key content belongs in the initial HTML. Second, format: put the answer in the first sentence or two, use specific facts, and write passages that make sense on their own. This is the core of our AI search optimisation service.
4. Entity and brand signals, with digital PR
Search engines and AI systems build a picture of your business from everything written about it. Describe yourself the same way on your site, profiles and directories, and add Organization structured data with sameAs links to your official profiles. Then earn mentions in publications your customers read. Digital PR does both jobs: it earns links on merit and, from what we observe, the kind of third-party coverage that AI answers lean on for commercial questions.
5. Local SEO for multi-location businesses
Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence. For brands with several branches, that means one accurate Business Profile per real location, under the real-world business name with no added keywords. It means location pages with genuinely local content rather than swapped place names, and reviews requested from every customer, never incentivised or filtered first. Thin pages built only to rank in each town count as doorway pages under Google’s spam policies.
6. International set-ups for the UK, US and Türkiye
If you sell in more than one of our three markets, the set-up matters as much as the translation. Use reciprocal hreflang annotations (en-GB, en-US, tr-TR and an x-default), localise content rather than copying it, and don’t redirect visitors automatically by IP address: Googlebot mostly crawls from the US, so it may never see your other versions.
7. Honest measurement
With GA4 as the baseline, we set up key events for the actions that matter (enquiries, calls, sales), link Search Console to GA4 and raise GA4’s data retention for explorations from the default two months to 14. Search Console keeps 16 months of data, which makes year-on-year comparisons possible. It doesn’t report AI Overviews separately, so we don’t pretend to measure them precisely. Our reports lead with enquiries and revenue, not rankings: our process shows how we report, and our pricing shows what each programme includes.
How we’re sequencing the work
Not every priority suits every business. We score each one for impact and effort on the site in front of us, and a typical starting picture looks like this.
Where 2025’s priorities usually sit
What we’re doing less of
Some habits cost more than they return, and a few now carry real risk:
- Thin, scaled content. Churning out pages at scale to catch searches, with little value for readers, is exactly what Google’s scaled content abuse policy targets, whether people or AI wrote them.
- Chasing every keyword. Separate pages for every variation of a query split your signals and compete with each other. One strong page per search intent does more.
- Buying links. Paid links meant to pass ranking credit breach Google’s spam policies, and sponsored links should carry
rel="sponsored". We earn links through digital PR instead.
Shifting the effort
Doing less of
- Scaled pages that reword what already ranks
- A separate page for every keyword variation
- Bought or swapped links
- Ranking reports with no link to enquiries
Doing more of
- Fewer pages, built on first-hand experience
- One strong page per search intent
- Mentions and links earned through digital PR
- Reports built on key events, leads and revenue
Our first-quarter plan
For most sites, the first three months of 2025 look like this:
First-quarter actions
- Crawl the site and clear errors in the Page indexing report
- Check field data for LCP, INP and CLS on your main templates
- Set up GA4 key events for enquiries, calls and sales
- Link Search Console to GA4 and set retention to 14 months
- Check robots.txt and CDN rules for blocked AI crawlers
- Rewrite your top pages so the answer comes first
- Review Business Profiles and hreflang if you run several locations or markets
- Agree the three numbers you’ll report on every month
Want to know which of these priorities matter most for your site? Request a free SEO audit and we’ll tell you where to start.