SEO is a time-consuming activity, and the unfortunate reality is, there isn’t an unlimited amount of time to spend on SEO, even though, there’s virtually an unlimited amount of SEO tasks to be performed on a website.
This means businesses and SEO professionals need to focus on those areas where they get the largest return on investments
By making use of the various enterprise-grade SEO tools available, you can leverage the awesomeness of automation and cut down on manual SEO tasks, but that only goes so far.
SEO changes constantly. To keep up with all the changes requires hours of devotion (and testing) each week. The changes were even more prevalent in 2024, with hundreds, or possibly even thousands of algorithm updates being released.
With SEO, we need to juggle the double-edged sword, of being proactive enough to ensure a website is in the best possible shape to weather the next search engine algorithm that is released, whilst at the same time, being reactive to the learning from the impact of past algorithms.
There are many excellent lists as to what to focus on for SEO in 2025, but each and every website should have an independent plan for improvement, based on it’s strengths and weaknesses.
As a result, I’ve decided to take the opportunity to compile my own list of focus areas for 2021, based on my experience and the collection of client websites I work on.
So, here are the top aspects I’ll be focusing on in 2024 (in no particular order):
1. Schema
Schema markup is code that is added to a website that assists search engines to better understand its content and deliver more meaningful & feature-rich results. Here is an example of recipe schema implementation:
Although Schema isn’t new, it’s previously been a challenge to get a web developer’s time to implement schema changes to a website.
Some newer SEO plugins like SEOPress have been released in the past couple of years which makes this job far easier.
So, in 2025, I’ll be auditing the Schema on all the websites I work on, consolidating schema plugins that make the implementation of schema more efficient and consistent.
2. AI Overviews
Google’s wading into AI began in 2024, with their long awaited AI Overviews being launched in 150 countries in late 2024. Being found in AI Overviews will bring additional traffic and the use of direct answers via FAQs will be a focus for SEO in 2025.
3. People Also Ask & FAQs
People Also Ask (PAA) are on the increase. This process involves reviewing content, to ensure the 8-10 word queries are answered. It’s especially important for the “w” searches (Who, What, When Where, Why).
These queries are often picked up by AI Overviews and ChatGPT, so it’s important to focus on FAQ and PAA searches.
4. UX
5. Click Through rate (CTR) optimisation
Click Through Rate optimisation makes google search results more “clickable”. SERP features also help to make results more clickable, but regular organic results should also be optimised for CTR, by carefully crafting URLs, SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions.
Here’s an example of a sub-optimal search engine listing:
The URL is truncated, the SEO title isn’t descriptive and the meta description is also truncated.
6. Topical Authority
Being a subject matter expert on a topic is crucial to perform well in search. As a result, I’ll be performing a topical authority review and competitor gap analysis on sites to ensure topical authority is demonstrated to Google. Various AI powered tools make this exercise more efficient than performing the task manually.
7. E-E-A-T
In August 2018, Google released the first known algorithm that addressed Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) for a website. In short, the search engine wants to ensure content served displays these virtues. That makes it essential to build up the profile of authors on your website and include thorough author bios.
Originally, the 2018 algorithm hit sites that were in the Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) niche, that covered mainly health and wealth sites. In subsequent core updates, the reach was expanded and other sites such as legal and consulting services with poor E-A-T were also hit.
What I’ll be doing
As a start, I’ll be reviewing author bios and pages to ensure they demonstrate E-A-T values. This should be applied to all sites, no matter the niche they belong to.
8. Link Building
Links have always been one of the top ranking factors for Google. Although the importance of links is slowly declining, backlinks remain one of the most important and (time consuming!) aspects of SEO.
I’ll be allocating resources to build topically relevant links from good quality websites. In 2025 and beyond, it’s imperative that the links you acquire are high quality, relevant and natural.
9. Content audit
Content and SEO on a website are never static. As new content is published, other pieces of content on your site are slowly becoming obsolete.
Every ~3 months on a large site and ~6 months on a small/medium website I review content.
The metrics I recommend for review:
- Last update > 24 months
- > 200 words (any pages < 200 words should be deleted)
- < 15 page views/mth
- 0 backlinks
10. Internal linking
Internal linking is the process of generating internal links between pages or posts on your website. This method allows you to control the authority of pages, by distributing it from stronger to weaker pages which helps them to rank higher.
As part of my 2025 strategy, I’ll be working on internal linking for websites, ensuring the pages that bring in the most traffic, or those that are key pages have sufficient internal links and strength.
11. Creating awesome content
I can’t stress the importance of awesome content! High quality copywriting is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Without content, quite simply, your site won’t rank.
The days of short content that partially answers the query, or content that is stuffed with keywords, or 100% AI generated won’t cut it in 2025. I advocate only using high quality writers that are experts in their niche, or if using AI to generate content, it’s imperative it’s reviewed and edited to catch AI “hallucinations” and to ensure the content is original.
It’s always a good idea to focus on content that fills content gaps (ie topics you want your site to rank for).
In 2025, I strongly recommend you focus on targeted content marketing efforts. Good content creation is expensive, so it’s imperative you write content on topics that are likely to be successful (based on past performance of traffic/shares), rather than picking random topics you “think” your readers would be interested in reading.
TL;DR
Although there are many lists on the internet that cover what to focus on for SEO in 2025, my take is a little different. That’s because it’s based on the issues I see on client sites and where I can derive the greatest ROI from limited resources.