The digital landscape is becoming more competitive and evolving at an amazing pace. The algorithms that rank the organic content also keep on changing at an accelerated rate. In the recent years, SEO specialists have started to understand that simply stuffing keywords will not rank you at the top of search engine results page. You need to have a quality content apart from other things. You need to have your audience in mind and create content that resonates with them.

If you are struggling to rank, chances that you are still using outdated SEO techniques might be high. Although google and other search engines don’t pinpoint the factors that go into ranking, but we do know that it keeps on changing and how important it is to keep those changes in mind while doing your SEO. They do leave us breadcrumbs that give us information what we can do to get ahead of the curve.

With 2025 just around the corner, these last few months might be the best time for you to review your website for your current SEO standing. Research why you are having a hard time ranking in the first place and create SEO strategy that will work best for your online business.

Although Google has already warned SEO strategist about these common mistakes, but they are still widely practiced today. Before getting into the SEO trends for 2025, let us get into a these common mistakes that can get your website spiraling down in terms of SEO.

Here are the 5 common misconceptions people have related to getting ranked.

Keyword Stuffing
Not Focusing on User Experience (UX)
Content Copying from other websites
Focusing solely on Backlinks
Not paying attention to local SEO

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is unnatural use of keywords so much so that the sentences usually don’t make sense. This is mostly done with the aim of ranking higher on the SERP. Keyword stuffing can sometimes also be done in Meta title and Meta descriptions. Apart from this, people also use keyword stuffing in alt-text for images and URLs.

The image below shows what keywords stuffing might look like.

If the aim is to rank higher for these keywords, why is it so bad?

Keyword stuffing mostly lead to poor-quality content. This type of content can look spammy and can ruin your brand image. Since Google rewards high-quality content, this type of poor quality content will not be ranked.

In recent years, Google has warned businesses about keyword stuffing and violation of Google’s spam policy as well. If it detects this type of tactic, the website might end up getting a penalty.

Not focusing on User Experience (UX)

Neglecting a good user experience while optimizing for search engines, can lead to a higher bounce rate. Ultimately, this would end up affecting your SEO even if you have a good SEO strategy. The sweet point lies in finding a balance between SEO and a smooth user journey throughout the website.

Suppose you come across a website that has immaculate SEO, clean content, just the right number of keywords and images also optimized. But the design is lacking. Even if such a website ranks on search engines, chances are, the users will not stay long enough on the website.

UI/UX and SEO can complement each other perfectly. You just have to find the right balance between the two.

Content Copying from other websites

Google’s algorithms can penalize websites that are copying or scraping content from other websites. This can end up nullifying your SEO efforts. Especially if you are copying from a website that has more domain authority. Since google also takes into account the DA of a website to determine which one to trust more.

You can avoid this by focusing on creating a high-quality content and offering your visitors a unique insight rather than copying from other websites.

Focusing solely on backlinks.

Although backlinks play a huge role when it comes to website ranking, but if you are only focusing on backlinks and not providing visitors with the content that satisfies their search intent, you will have a hard time ranking.

If you focus on quality content that builds your website authority, you will end up gaining backlinks over time.

Ignoring Local SEO especially if you are a physical business

If you have physical locations and you are ignoring the importance of local SEO, you might be making a big mistake. This will lead to missed opportunities. There is a studied that outlines that more than 46% of google searches have a local intent.
By listing your business on Google my business, optimizing it for certain keywords and focusing on getting positive reviews can all boost your visibility to potential customers.

5 Best SEO Practices for 2025

Now that we know what are some of the things you should avoid doing, lets move to some things you should definitely be doing in 2025 to rank higher on social media.

Mobile First Design
Web Vital Optimization
SEO and E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
Local SEO

Mobile First Design

What is mobile-first indexing? And why your mobile design is so important? Mobile first indexing simply means that Google’s crawlers look at the mobile version of the website over its desktop’s content. Having a good and error free mobile version has a great impact on your website’s SEO. Here are some of the best mobile-friendly practices.

Responsiveness

A responsive design adapts to different screen sizes on different devices. It arranges the elements on the screen; text, images and form, making your website design look seamless on any device. This enhances the user experience.
Image below shows what a responsive design looks like.

Optimize media for mobile and desktop

Images are an important part of any website. But the issue with images over text is that they can take up a lot of bandwidth and ultimately increase the load time. This will lead to issues like slow loading on mobile devices.

It has become really important to optimize the images, now more than ever since Google has mobile-first indexing. Here are some steps you can take to optimize the images for different devices:

Use high quality images but compress them to decrease the load time.
Provide a sitemap for your images
Try Lazy loading the images to save bandwidth

Check for mobile friendliness

If you want to check for mobile friendliness, you can use PageSpeed Insights tool. It will analyze your webpages and give you a score reflecting the performance of your website on mobile as well as desktop. It will also give you suggestions on how you can improve these scores and make your website perform better.

Web Vital Optimization

Moving into 2025, optimizing core web vitals will become more important. This is because of Google’s algorithm that focuses on Page Speed, User experience including how interactive your website is and how stable it is throughout the user journey.

Your website will have to meet all these requirements to get better results on SERP and have a good chunk of organic traffic.

Here is what you need to do to optimize your core web vitals:

Optimize Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Ideally, the largest content on your web page should load under 1.8 seconds. To check this, head over to PageSpeed Insights and put in your website URL. It will perform a diagnosis and tell you how your website is performing. Under LCP, check if it is under 1.8 seconds. Otherwise scroll down and see the suggestion on what elements in your webpage you can optimize or compress to bring this down.

First Input Delay (FID)

For a seamless interactive experience, FID should ideally be under 50ms. Follow the steps mentioned above to check how your webpage is performing. Try optimizing the contents suggested for decreasing FID index.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

For a stable visual and a good user experience, make your CLS remains below 0.05. CLS is a measure of how much your content shifts while your page is being downloaded. This decreases the user experience as it can leave them distracted. The most common cause of CLS is undefined element sizes; like buttons, images or paragraphs. This can easily be fixed by specifying dimensions for each element.

SEO and E-E-A-T

By 2025, it is anticipated that Google’s current E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and trustworthiness) algorithm will include another important factor i.e Experience. This means, websites that include real-world experiences in their webpages will dominate the SERPs.
How can you include experience along with expertise in your content? Simply share the content of industry experts including real-world examples in your content.

Another important step you can take is focusing on building Author Bios. This will let the search bots know the content was written by an expert. You can even validate this expertise through third-party references.

If you want to build more trust, you can showcase case studies, client testimonials and success stories. This will help build trust with your new visitors as well.

Focus on Local SEO

With search engines using AI-driven results, the SERP will be dominated by local results. Studies show more than 46% of searches have local intent. To dominate the local searches, make sure you are doing these following things. Be sure to optimize your business for searches using keywords like “near me” queries. Optimize your Google my business profile keeping it up to date including images, working hours and change of address.

Conclusion

Moving into 2025, SEO trends will be more focused on personalized and user-centric results. This might be the right time to have a look at your website, audit it and make sure you are prepared for the years to come. With technical advances and the world shifting towards AI, we are bound to see SEO trends change. However, if your website is optimized for mobile and you focus on your visitor’s journey through web vitals and general performance, you are ready to thrive in the coming years.

Get a free SEO Audit for your website

If you are still confused about where to start or just want to find the current standing of your website, contact us now to get a free SEO website audit today.