It's 2025 and we still don't have a crystal ball. We are however one year older and snarter than when we've published our insights for 2024.
As always we've correlate what we know about ranking websites and what was happening with search in 2024. lus, a recent leak from within Google has revealed some insights we’ve long suspected: Google isn’t entirely transparent about its inner workings (to put it mildly).
Before we start. I think it's fair to say that we've been 100% correct in our predictions so fra. So fingers crossed we can do the trick again in 2025.
##2025 SEO Search Ranking Factors
Last years we have warned about reliance on AI generated content and oh boy we haven't missed.
Google is having a field day deindexing oceans of AI spam. In fact, many would suggest that Google has shifted to not indexing by default. Vincent Schmalbach wrote a great post on it a couple months ago. Check it here: https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/google-now-defaults-to-not-indexing-your-content/
While in the past the problem we had was often Google indexing something we did not want to index by mistake, now getting a new page indexed requires hard work.
That's the indexing part. As far as ranking is concerned, content will continue to be a massive ranking factor in 2025. Longer content (1000 words plus) continues to perform better.
hmm... was this a real thing or is Google simply favouring bigger brands and sites with higher Domain Authority and how do we go around it? We'll reserve answer to this one for our paying clients.
Knowing how to find and optimise your pages for keywords remains a top factor. This of course goes hand in hand with what we just said about content. A generic or AI content may include keywords but these will not be what we call well researched keywords. It simply won't rank high enough.
Links continue to be number one ranking factor. And the ability to find, prospect and acquire the right quintity and the right type of links at the right time is what makes a difference ebtween mediocar SEO and a tru master of the arts of SEO. It's a zero sum game, you either rank or you dont.
Intresting parts from the Google Leak:
(E-E-A-T) experience and expertise
hmm... was this a real thing or is Google simply favouring bigger brands and sites with higher Domain Authority and how do we go around it? We'll reserve answer to this one for our paying clients.
There’s no escaping it: technical SEO remains the backbone of any successful website. Ensuring your site is free of errors, loads quickly, and is mobile-friendly is as important now as ever. Technical mishaps can literally break your SEO. One thing we've noticed is that speed, while important, does not correlate very much with rankings. So do not obsess over PageSpeed Insights.
Crawling isn’t free, and search engine bots have a limited budget when it comes to indexing your pages. In 2025, optimising how search engines crawl your site is more critical than ever.
If you use a lot of AI content, you may be in for rude awakening this year.
As in 2024 and before. Social has zero effect on your organic rankings. So do not invest efforts there with the hope of improving your SEO. That simply won't happen.
Here’s where things get really interesting. A recent (2024) leak from within Google has confirmed what we’ve long suspected. There are undisclosed signals and internal tweaks at play in the ranking algorithm. We will have more on that later 🙂
