Content
How to Do SEO in 2025: Key Strategies for Sustainable Growth
May 6, 2025
15 mins
Instability in search results has become the new normal: numerous Google updates, personalized SERPs, increasing AI influence, and declining CTRs are now the daily reality of eCommerce.
In this article, we've gathered relevant insights and practical tips from Promodo's webinar: how to adapt your SEO strategy in 2025, what to do with informational queries, how to strengthen your brand for AI, and why you should consider deindexing certain pages on your website—before it's too late.
In 2025, Google is expected to roll out at least 8–10 algorithm updates—a trend that has remained consistent over the past few years. But why so many?
One of the biggest threats to organic traffic today is the rise of zero-click searches. In Western markets (USA, EU, UK), an unusual trend was observed in Q4 2024: while demand for products in shopping, hobby, and sports categories grew significantly, CTR in search results noticeably declined.
The main reason? Google’s introduction of the AI Overview block, which generates instant answers directly in the search results. This AI-driven feature now appears in 36% of queries in the U.S. market. And it’s not limited to informational queries—it affects 33% of commercial queries as well, drastically reducing the number of clicks to external websites.
In essence, Google is keeping the traffic for itself. The platform aims to retain users within its own ecosystem by displaying answers, prices, availability, and more, without requiring a click. As a result, over 60% of searches in the U.S. and EU now end without any clicks at all.
Of the users who do click, nearly one-third are redirected to Google-owned services rather than organic websites.
Promodo specialists have observed a growing trend: Google now prefers websites that actively invest in brand awareness. Previously, it was much easier to rank higher by focusing on metadata optimization, content quality, backlinks, or even competitive pricing. Today, however, Google places increasing emphasis on brand recognition.
This means that if your brand is more recognizable than a competitor’s, it gives you a clear advantage in search rankings. Visibility, trust signals, and mentions across the web now carry more weight, making brand-building an essential part of any modern SEO strategy.
Increasing brand awareness not only improves your rankings in traditional search but also significantly boosts your chances of appearing in AI overviews.
Large language models (LLMs) tend to rely on information from well-known, authoritative sources. Research by Ahrefs confirms that recognizable brands are much more likely to be cited in AI-generated answers.
If you've already reached your technical limits, your brand could be the deciding factor that tips the scales in your favor against competitors.
However, it’s important not to rely on brand awareness alone — it should be part of a broader strategy.
An interesting study by Neil Patel shows that SEO investments for completely new brands may not be cost-effective in the first 2–3 years. The reason is simple — Google has no trust signals for the new brand yet. That’s why young companies should first invest in building brand awareness and reputation (PR, mentions, social media) before launching full-scale SEO campaigns. In the long run, this approach delivers far better results.
AI doesn’t “rate your brand on a scale” — it reads the context and frequency of mentions across the internet.
Tip: Use multiple channels — SEO, social media, email marketing, video — all of this contributes to a robust digital footprint.
Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to enter your brand name and see whether search frequency is growing over time.
Or, search for mentions of your brand in Google using the operator:
“your brand name” -site:yourwebsite.com — this will show who is talking about you and where.
The more high-quality mentions you have, the higher the chances that AI tools (including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and others) will recognize your brand as well-known and trustworthy.
In the past, having a wide site structure with hundreds of subcategories, filters, and tags helped cover even low-volume keywords.
This was known as Programmatic SEO — a method where hundreds or even thousands of pages were automatically generated for virtually any search query, even if a page contained only one product or minimal content.
But today, Google is shifting from quantity to quality.
If your site has a large number of low-quality or outdated pages, it can negatively impact your overall rankings.
When your site is cluttered with low-quality or “junk” pages, search engine bots waste valuable resources crawling them. These pages often lack useful content, offer poor user value, and are poorly optimized. As a result, they dilute the core message of your site and weaken its overall authority in Google's eyes.
This becomes especially noticeable during algorithm updates — your site risks losing rankings due to the large volume of low-quality content.
To maintain a high-quality site, regular cleanup is essential:
Log analysis helps you understand which pages bots are crawling — and whether those crawls are necessary.
A log file is a server record that shows:
With these insights, you can improve your technical SEO:
If bots see that most of your pages aren't being indexed, they may start viewing the site as low-quality. For example, if only 20,000 of 250,000 pages are indexed, that’s a negative signal — even if the rest are blocked via noindex or robots.txt, bots still attempt to crawl them, wasting resources.
There’s a direct link between a high number of non-indexed, low-value pages and a decline in impressions and clicks in Google search results. We've seen this pattern confirmed across numerous client cases:
Bottom line: Clearly signal to Google what matters — and what doesn’t. Don’t overload your site with pages you don’t plan to index. If they exist, either delete them or block them from crawling entirely.
In 2025, it’s not about the number of backlinks — it’s about their quality and topical relevance.
Our internal analysis using Collaborator revealed a compelling trend: the cost of placing links on high-quality referring domains is increasing by approximately 19% annually.
Simply buying a large number of links and expecting a boost in rankings is no longer sufficient. Google is increasingly analyzing backlink profiles, considering the following factors:
The topical relevance of the referring domain is one of the most crucial aspects of modern SEO. For example, if your site sells construction materials, a single link from an authoritative construction-focused site will benefit you far more than five or even ten links from general or unrelated sites (e.g., cosmetics or finance).
Fewer, but highly relevant and quality links are more beneficial than a larger number of ineffective ones.
This includes the domain’s traffic dynamics and the quality of its traffic from various channels.
How trusted is the referring site?
Is the site turning into a "link farm"?
For instance, you might have 1600 backlinks from various sites, but if 75% of those links come from sources with little to no traffic, they will be practically useless in terms of boosting rankings or driving additional traffic to your site.
One of the most effective tactics of 2025 is organic and native link building. In other words, links you gain not through payment but because your content is useful, unique, or viral.
How Does It Work in Practice?
You create valuable content (e.g., original research, analytics, rankings, or interesting insights). Other websites and media outlets pick up this information and begin citing you in their materials. Even if the links are nofollow, their value remains due to the uniqueness of the referring domains and the natural link profile.
For instance, at Promodo, we've seen how publishing interesting research has resulted in dozens of links from authoritative publications and websites that otherwise would have been out of reach.
Also read in our case study, how we acquired free links for our client the Ariamo Fashion Group.
To evaluate referring domains, there are many great tools that allow you to comprehensively analyze the quality of the sites where you place your links. We recommend using the following tools:
There's also a common misconception: "An expensive link is automatically a quality one." However, this is not entirely true.
Yes, more expensive donors often have better SEO metrics and higher trust. But the high price alone doesn’t guarantee value. It's essential to check not only the SEO metrics but also:
It may take more time, but the quality of the backlink will pay off in the long term.
Google clearly states that AI-generated content, which is created without adding additional value, is considered low-quality. Research by Neil Patel has shown that human-written content gradually sees stable traffic growth, while purely AI-generated content tends to have inconsistent results.
How to Use AI Effectively:
AI can be a helpful tool for streamlining certain aspects of content creation, but it's crucial to ensure that the final output provides real value to users and is not just a rehash of generic information.
Focus on creating in-depth, well-researched content that answers common informational queries. This not only provides real value to your audience but also increases your chances of ranking higher for these queries.
Implement structured data (schema markup) to help search engines and AI better understand your content and its relevance. This can improve your visibility in rich snippets and other search features.
Secure backlinks from authoritative sources your audience trusts, such as Wikipedia, expert blogs, and reputable media outlets. This strengthens your brand’s credibility and positively impacts SEO.
In 2025, a new concept emerged — Generative Optimization (GEO). It is the optimization of content to be in cluded in AI-generated responses:
In content, it is important to:
Promodo SEO experts' tips:
In 2025, it is crucial to understand that:
According to Backlinko's statistics, over 71% of consumers look for information about a brand or store not on its website, but on external platforms. People are increasingly distrusting reviews posted directly on brand websites. Therefore, your task is to encourage genuine customers to leave honest reviews on external platforms such as Google Maps, Hotline, social media, etc.
How to do this?
Interestingly, according to the same Backlinko study, companies that respond to at least 75% of reviews can increase their sales by up to 35% compared to those who don’t.
In 2025, SEO is becoming even more dynamic: frequent Google updates, the rise of AI, personalization of search results, and competition for screen space are forcing businesses to act flexibly. A strong brand, high-quality content, site structure optimization, and proper work with local SEO are fundamental elements that will help maintain positions and scale up. The winners will be those who adapt to the new rules of the game now.
Team Lead of Content for promodo.com
Content marketing manager at Promodo with 7+ years of writing.
When creating valuable business content, I always seek fresh data, interesting facts, the expertise of professionals, and meaningful insights to bring relevant ideas to the audience. I believe that good content can enrich the experience of marketers, empower business owners to make data-driven decisions, and enhance companies in growth.
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