Top 5 Need-To-Know SEO Trends for Small Businesses (2025)

The world of SEO literally changes faster than the seasons do. Which is why savvy small business owners (or the SEO pros they hire!) who care about SEO traffic need to stay updated as much as possible.

Because Google has ~90% market share of search engines overall, people take notice when the company makes changes. At least they should – what worked pre-2020 doesn’t work anymore.

Based on research, Google’s changes, and what 15-year SEO veterans have said, I’ve compiled the most important SEO trends for 2025 and beyond. But why stop there? It’d be boring if it did. To help business owners, bloggers, course creators, and others, I’ve also included a boatload of actionable tips in each section. Let’s get into it!

01. Increased Focus on Brand Authority

To help combat against the surge of mass-produced, low-quality AI content, Google is increasingly putting a focus on strengthening the weight of trustworthy brands.

That’s why you’ll see Forbes ranking higher for ‘best affordable lawnmowers’ instead of websites by actual yard workers or gardening enthusiasts. This isn’t perfect, and sometimes Google gets it wrong by valuing a brand higher than the quality of the content.

Another way Google’s paying attention to brands is by introducing site names in search results. Here’s an example:

Understandably, Google introduced this feature in order to make it a lot easier for searchers to recognize the brand’s they know and find what they’re looking for faster. Google’s engineers are just doing their best to keep the top results on Google high-quality and easy to find, which you might’ve also noticed, is harder than it sounds.

So what does that mean for you?

1. Add your business to high-quality directories (I can do this for you!)
2. Be a guest on more podcast episodes
3. Write guest posts on others’ blogs
4. Publish high-quality, SEOed blog posts on your blog (I can also do this for you!)
5. Grow your social media accounts
6. Make sure your site name is accurate by googling your business name

02. Prioritization of Authority on Topics

Don’t worry – topical authority sounds more complicated than it actually is. When you’ve got a lot of it, it means your website is one of the go-to’s for your niche and main topics. In a nutshell, Google rewards websites that have a lot of topical authority because when a website covers a niche from all angles, it’s a better experience for readers and searchers and proof that that website holds a deeply knowledgable hub of information on that niche. Readers are able to browse and more easily find complete answers to what they’re looking to learn more about.

Google has strengthened this a lot over the past couple of years, even introducing algorithmic updates that penalized big publishers who had been publishing blog posts (and getting a lot of Google traffic from them!) totally unrelated to what the publisher is about. For example, before 2024, Forbes had been publishing a lot of seemingly random blog posts, which had been working really well for them. Then around fall 2024, Forbes got hit with a site reputation abuse penalty.

What we can learn from this, as small business owners, is that Google is increasingly caring about improving the searcher’s experience. The algorithms are increasingly prioritizing content from actual experts, not publishers or businesses trying to game it.

Let’s say you’re a fitness coach for marathon runners and you want to develop your topical authority on marathon running. In that case, you’d want to write about subtopics like:

• Does marathon running help or harm your knees?
• How to start marathon running
• Is marathon running bad for your heart?

And so on to cover as many aspects of marathon running as you can. Apply this to your niche and you’ll be way ahead of your competitors who are writing about a bunch of different topics.

03. Introduction of AI

In May 2024, Google officially launched the Search Generative Experience (now rebranded to Google AI Overviews) in Google’s search results. It’s essentially AI thats purpose is to provide results to searches in a better, faster, and easier way for searchers. They continue to test a lot of things about it (it’s far from perfect), but for now, it’s here to stay.

Google had been working on AI things for several years beforehand, and only released Bard (now Gemini) and announced they’re working on Google AI Overviews after OpenAI came out with ChatGPT and formed an alliance with Microsoft’s Bing. Of course, that sent Google into panic mode.

So what does that mean for you?

• Continue to publish high-quality, comprehensive, and reader-friendly blog posts
• Double down on strengthening your brand online
• Build your online reputation via being a guests on podcasts, getting featured in online publications, etc.
• Grow your social media accounts with non-bot followers (never buy followers!)

04. Increase of Transparency

Most likely to fight against spammers and scammers, Google launched the ability to see a social media account’s amount of followers or subscribers right in search results. This allows searchers to find a brand’s account a lot easier among a sea of fakers and pretenders.

If you search your ‘business name + social media account’ (like sweetsea digital instagram), you’ll immediately see how many followers/subscribers you have on that account. Here’s an example:

While there are a lot of good reasons for Google to make this change, a HUGE con is that there’ll be people who’ll pay to buy followers/subscribers to artificially inflate their numbers. So over time, determining which account’s genuine and which isn’t will become even harder.

So what does that mean for you?

• Publish consistently on your highest ROI social media accounts

05. More Media-Friendly

As of 2025, Google either owns or has agreements with major social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Google Podcasts, LinkedIn, and X) that allow Google to serve content published on these platforms within Google search results.

This trend started all the way back in 2011 with the launch of Google Plus, and has only become a stronger trend over the years with the rise of social media. Back in May 2023, Google launched a new feature in Google Search in an attempt to introduce more of the human experience and perspective that makes TikTok so attractive. It was called Perspectives.

It was a filter that specifically highlighted related social media content, blog posts, forums, Q&A sites, etc. to showcase more creator-y content.

But in March 2024, Google decided to shut down Perspectives and instead introduce a Forums filter in its place. Why? According to Search Engine Land, Google said that it continues to invest in making it easier for searchers to find content that reflects people’s perspectives and first-hand experiences on Search. And that their data showed people preferred visiting forums instead of seeing social media posts.

So what does that mean for you?

• Focus on infusing unique, insightful perspectives and first-hand experiential knowledge into your blog posts

Writer’s Note

If you found this helpful, be sure to bookmark this page! Every year, I’ll come back here and update this page with the latest SEO trends. Of course, if something crazy happens in the SEO world before a year comes around, I’ll still pop in and do an update. If you think you’ll forget to check back often (it happens, no judgement), connect with me on Instagram to get the latest!