4 core SEO marketing strategies for 2025 and beyond

Wisdom Ukpeh
Jul 22
4 min read

Today, SEO presents valuable opportunities for businesses of all sizes. The more visible your brand is across digital touchpoints, the more leads and engagement you can generate.

So, how do you take advantage of the opportunity?

This article outlines 4 core SEO marketing strategies that should improve your brand’s visibility in 2025 and beyond. Let’s dive in.

1. Optimize for Generative Engine Optimization

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is a new SEO strategy focused on optimizing for AI-generated search summaries. With Google and Bing integrating AI into their search results, AI summaries with traditional links offer an unexpected opportunity for lesser-known businesses.

What is the opportunity?

David Kaufman conducted a compelling experiment by querying ChatGPT 100 times for the ‘best support ticketing software.’ His results revealed that AI-generated answers varied significantly. This means that AI-generated search results are dynamic, offering lesser-known businesses a chance to feature on the SERP.

How do you align your content with this search generative experience?

Here's what I recommend:

Use structured data and schema markups: For Google’s AI to recognize your content’s intent, use FAQ, HowTo, and VideoObject schemas. These schemas help AI read and understand your content. Use the Rich Result test and schema markup generator to generate and validate your schema.
Practice entity-based SEO: Focus on building authority around entities (people, organizations, locations, concepts) rather than just keywords. For example, a travel blogger targeting "Paris" should create content clusters and pillar pages to establish topical authority. Use Google’s NLP API to optimize around entities, not just keywords
Think beyond keyword research: Before designing your SEO strategy, consider the search intent category you want to rank for. Then, research the keywords for the content. The search intent categories and content types include:
- Informational: blog posts, how-tos
- Commercial: comparison pages, case studies
- Transactional: product pages, CTAs
- Navigational: branded pages

2. Diversify Your Traffic Sources

SEO is now bigger than Google. People search everywhere for answers, especially on community forums and social media. For instance, people now say, “Did you Reddit it?” A study by Search Engine Land found Reddit appears in nearly two-thirds of all discussion forum slots on Google’s SERPs. Fascinating right?

How do you diversify your website traffic?

Repurpose SEO content for social media: Break long-form content into social media posts. Your goal here is to create engaging content on social media relevant to the topic. At Cloud Kitchen Concept, I used this approach to attract more unique visitors. The picture below shows the result of my SEO content marketing strategy

Leverage the community forum search: Reddit and Quora feature more on the SERP as searchers’ intents evolve. Also, community forums position themselves as solution-based platforms. For example, when I had a problem with my Soundcore earbuds, I found the solution on Reddit. So, create an account on these forums and become the go-to thought leader in the industry.
Register with Bing Webmaster Tool: With AI integration, Bing's market share is growing. Thus, you should add Bing to your traffic source. Unlike Google, Bing prioritizes metadata and social signals. So, use social sharing, proper tags, and clean metadata to optimize your presence.

3. Build a brand, not just a website

AI-generated content used to be a shortcut. Now, it’s a red flag. Google isn’t just skimming your posts, they’re sniffing for souls. You can’t fake authority anymore. Google now asks: Do you have experience? Have people vouched for you? Are you real?” That is why Google added an E to the E-A-T framework. So what does E-E-A-T stand for?

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. To feature in the SERP, your content should be appetizing enough for the hungry web crawler. Early this year, I wrote an article that followed the E-E-A-T framework and it featured on Google’s SERP.

How do you use the E-E-A-T framework to build your brand content?

Experience: Demonstrate experience by sharing personal insights, career milestones, and real-world case studies through your personal brand. Also, share your customers’ experiences through case studies and user-generated content.
Expertise: Create accounts on community forums and share your thought-leader content. How the community reacts to your content helps amplify your status as an expert in web crawlers. The more you contribute to community forums and link to your content, the better.
Authoritativeness: Design a content marketing strategy to make your brand an authority in relevant topics. For instance, I built a pillar page that discusses everything one needs to know about branding and created short-form content on LinkedIn to attract visitors to the website.
Trustworthiness: To build brand trust, encourage your visitors to comment on your content. Also, secure backlinks, guest features, and mentions from credible sites. These external votes of confidence matter as much as internal quality.

4. Improve your website’s technical SEO

Technical SEO is the foundation of your website. Without a strong foundation, your quality content won’t thrive. A strong SEO foundation does the following:

Improves your user experience
Increases your chance of ranking on Google’s first page
Reduces high bounce rate

How do you improve your site’s technical SEO?

Though technical SEO is broad and in-depth, don’t let it scare you. You can improve your site’s technical SEO by doing the basic tasks. So the next time you hear of technical SEO, think of the following simple terms:

Making your website mobile-friendly
Improving your website speed to exceed Google’s Core Web Vitals benchmark
Designing an internal linking content plan for high-performing content clusters
Updating and recycling old content
Updating broken links and images
Keeping your URL to guide web crawlers. For instance, example.com/category/subcategory/page

These foundational steps are simpler than they might seem! To make this even easier for you, use the following 3 SEO tools to manage your site’s technical SEO:

Google Search Console: This tool helps make your site mobile-friendly and identify outdated content
PageSpeed Insight: This tool helps you amplify your website speed to surpass Google’s Core Web Vitals benchmark: LCP <2.5s, CLS <0.1, INP <200ms
Screaming Frog: This tool helps you solve broken links and image problems on your site

Where should you start your SEO marketing strategy?

Before crafting your SEO marketing strategy consider these four pillars:

Technical SEO (the foundation)
User experience
On-page optimization
Off-page optimization

Start with your technical SEO and finish with off-page optimization in that order. Also, each SEO marketing strategy in this article aligns with these four SEO pillars. Now, your next big traffic win might not be in this article; it might be in your head right now. So drop your favorite underrated SEO strategy in the comments. Let’s turn this into a strategy goldmine!