With the new year underway, you may be wondering what strategies you should implement for maximum SEO success in 2025. Chima’s got you covered! In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, she talks through her six top SEO tips for this year, which include driving brand awareness and diversifying your traffic sources.

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Brand is going to be absolutely critical for success in 2025. Now I know I'm here to talk to you about the top SEO tips for this year, but I just want you to have that at the back of your mind. So as you have conversations with your stakeholders, think about how you can use SEO to support the brand goals this year. 

My first tip for that is to create brand awareness to drive branded searches. Now this is something you can track in Moz Pro. You can just put in your brand name, and that's going to show you how many people are searching for your brand. Something I want to advise you to go a bit further is to put in your brand name plus the solutions or the products that you're offering to see how much people are looking for your brand solutions. 

For example, now a lot of people are searching for Domain Authority and they put Moz in front of that, or they're searching for things like Moz Local. Those branded searches, the increase in branded searches is going to tell you that all the efforts they are doing towards brand SEO is showing some good results. 

All right. What can you do to increase your brand awareness? Social media, digital PR, sponsorships, running promos and offering freebies, outdoor advertisement and paid media, SEO, and thought leadership. 

Obviously, as SEOs, we're just going to want to focus on this. But we've sat in silos for too long. So I want us to challenge ourselves to think about: How can SEO magnify other channels, and how can these other channels also magnify SEO? That way, we are all working towards a more unified goal that helps us achieve our brand target, whatever that may be. 

For example, thought leadership can support SEO because if you have thought leaders or you are creating thought leadership content, that is going to be really great content strategy, and that is going to give you more traffic in organic and even off-organic. 

Same with social media. You're creating content. You can use social media to amplify the content they are creating on your blog. You can also use digital PR to amplify freebies or whatever promo that you're running. Say you go to events and you're doing events and things like that. You can use that to magnify your brand in front of people that are consuming your content. 

It might not seem like SEO, but all of these different touchpoints working together can really make for great brand authority. 

Now, the one that everybody has been talking about, that I think you also need to focus on this year is going to be diversifying your traffic sources. We have seen AI Overviews absolutely eating into organic searches for so many brands out there, and everybody is saying the trick is to diversify.  

But what does that mean? How do you diversify your traffic sources? We've been so reliant on Google for so long, and I believe that the trick is with repurposing. 

Now I know it's hard to do. You want to just create content and move on to the next thing. You don't want to go back and then think about how can you flesh this out, blah blah blah blah. But think about it this way. If you are able to create one webinar and then turn that one webinar into two, three, four blog posts, you still hit your goal of creating fresh content. You just get more out of it. 

So here's something that we do at Moz. We created a webinar with Mike King on 101 SEO tools. We took that one webinar and we turned it into four blog posts that were put on the Moz blog. We then chopped up that webinar further, and we made bite-sized videos that we put on social media and YouTube. And then, we also supported that webinar with email. But even if we're not creating emails for webinars, you can also use this as a channel to support your podcast, support your blog, support all your other channels. 

It is very, very possible to use each of these channels to support each other. Video, everybody is talking about how video is going to be big in 2025. You can create that video content with your podcast, with your webinar, and then you can repurpose it to power the rest of your content strategy. 

See, this has nothing to do with Google. But it's still going to drive search from organic and also other channels. 

Now the one that everybody is talking about, optimizing for AI-generated results. I'll be clear. Google has said that there is nothing you can do to optimize for AI search. But when have we ever listened to Google as a source of truth?

There's been research, and there are many SEOs now who are experimenting with optimizing for AI Overviews and other AI search features. And some of the things that they have shared that are working include analyzing what is ranking in AI Overviews. Now this is data that you can get from Moz's enterprise tool called STAT. I've left the URL here for you, getstat.com. 

You can use this to understand what is ranking in AI or for any query at all. Once you understand what is ranking, you start to see a pattern in the words, how it's structured. That gives you an idea of what the search intent is. Very important to understand the search intent so that you know if it's informational, commercial, what type of query is it. 

Now once you understand that, you want to make the content really, really, really easy to read. It has to be super simple for anybody to read that content. Now the next thing is to make sure that the search query aligns with the target keyword, and the easy way to do that is to go into Google Search Console, go and take your URL, plug it in there, and see what Google is saying for that keyword. 

So, for example, you might be trying to rank for one keyword, but when you go into Search Console and you look at the data, what Google is picking up for that keyword is completely different. You want to make sure that both are aligned. The content that you've written and what Google is picking up, if there's misalignment, we are not going to get that AI Overview feature. The next thing is to include multimedia, statistics, expert quotes, not just any quotes, expert quotes from people who are respected as thought leaders. Basically, all of this gives you your E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness). 

And now, finally, you want to optimize for natural language. Now I'll tell you why this is very important. Apple has introduced Apple Intelligence, and they've added it into Siri. I use Google, and my phone is called a Google Pixel. I can have conversations with Gemini with my voice. Voice search and AI is now a thing. There is no going back. 

So think about how people are asking these questions in voice search, and you want to mirror that tone, that conversational way of talking when you create content. It has to feel natural. The way that it answers those questions or the answer that they are looking for is also going to be in-depth. So while you're making your content simple, you also want to make it as in-depth as possible. 

Now I know that this doesn't seem like something that is within our jobs as SEOs. But if you followed search news this year, then you know that Reddit and Quora are ranking for literally every single keyword you can think about. This is more of a warning. You cannot influence your audience to leave reviews for you on Quora or Reddit. It's most likely going to backfire. I actually raised this question during our recent webinar, and she said that is a tricky thing to do and she doesn't encourage it. I don't either.

Instead, how about you focus on other platforms, like Trustpilot, Capterra, and other places where your users can leave reviews for you? Trust me, Google is smart enough to still read these as signals for positive brand influence. 

Now talking about influence, you have your niche influencers. It has to be people that are in your industry, that Google has recognized as niche influencers. For example, I'm in SEO, so I'm always going to use SEO examples. I might think about people like Lily Ray and Mike King as my own influencers.

So if someone who has an SEO tool or is trying to do influencer marketing, these should be the kind of people that they will be reaching out to because Google trusts those people as authorities. The audience also trusts them. And if you bring that together, that is just magic.

All right. Take a look at this board. All of this is coming back to your brand. That is your ultimate goal for SEO in 2025. Make your brand bigger. Make your brand so big that people are thinking about it before they even come on search to start their journey. And that is going to drive more branded searches for you. 

Ultimately, you want to be able to track this, right? So we can go into GA4 and track how much referral traffic we are getting from AI search. And the way to do that, go into GA4.

Under Life Cycle, you find Acquisition, you find Traffic Acquisition, and then you filter by Session Campaign. And then, you can just type in ChatGPT. You can type in Gemini. You can type in whatever AI search platform you're looking at, and you can get that data. Or you can set up an exploration to get that data.

I hope that this is helpful for you. Good luck with SEO in 2025. Bye-bye.