SEO Best Practice Guide for 2025

In this overview, we will discuss some basic SEO methods and best practices for updating content on your website in 2025. If you have a requirement for additional support, please get in touch.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness

Part of Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines for human users is 'Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness', commonly abbreviated to E-E-A-T. The original acronym was E-A-T, before Google added the additional ‘E’ for Experience in December 2022, after concluding that real-world experience of a topic is an important factor when you are creating content about the topic.

These guidelines are used by human quality raters in order to assess the value of search results shown for a specific term.

In 2025, Google will continue to place high value on original, knowledgeable, unique content that comes from first-hand experience.

Optimising your content for E-E-A-T is a strategy that should improve the search performance of your website over time. The data from the human quality-raters employed by Google is used to continually develop and fine-tune Google's search algorithms, and help it display the most useful and relevant results in response to search queries.

Ways to demonstrate E-E-A-T in your content

1. Expertise of authors - who has written your content? Where possible, highlight the author and include an author biography. Why and how are they an expert in the topic that they are writing about? This may not work for 'corporate' pages on a website such as service pages, but may well work for resources or your blog.
2. Include specific references to reputable sources within your work – think about who and what you are going to reference when tackling a topic. This could include direct quotations from named, recognised experts, or papers or research studies in the field. Again this may not work for all 'corporate' pages but if you are providing an opinion piece, or summarising a relevant issue in your Industry, backing up your arguments and assertions with trusted third party sources is good.
3. Build brand authority by becoming an acknowledged expert in your industry. How can you highlight your expertise in your specialist area? Think about social proofs of your expertise, as well as simply stating your qualifications and experience. This may be most relevant on LinkedIn and in Industry-specific websites where your personal brand is key, but that can also be reflected on your company website.
4. Transparency and trust are key. You can show transparency and trustworthiness in your content by attributing or crediting data or ideas you are presenting to the original source, and by adopting an open manner of communication with your reader, instead of writing something that comes across as a sales pitch.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is an important part of giving your website the best chance to perform well in Google. There are many parts of this and for this article we are just going to focus on a few of them.

You should check your Core Web Vitals – factors such as loading speed, interactive experience and visual stability. You can use free tools such as PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse reports. These typically run on one page at a time, and will give you a set of figures for Desktop and a separate set for Mobile. The results in most reports are colour coded with (for example) red indicating a problem metric that needs attention, yellow a metric where improvement is wanted, and green a metric which is satisfactory (even though there may be room for further improvement).

You will also find additional information within Google Search Console - a free service you can sign up for via Google, verifying you are authorised to access the information contained in that by adding a DNS record, a meta tag or by uploading a file. It can take a few days for data to start appearing in search console, so the sooner it is set up the better. We recommend setting it up as a combined domain property if possible, rather than having individual properties for www and non-www versions or http and https.

It is generally worth speaking to your website developers to get help with improving your website metrics, such as the speed that pages start loading and finish loading, and how quickly they become usable. This can involve improving the hosting, adding caching, and speeding up database queries that run before the page can load. It can also involve 'lazy-loading' of images or page content at the point when those are actually needed, rather than straight away.

While many of the steps taken to improve these metrics are technical, you may be able to make some improvements yourself by compressing images on your website - big banner images used in rotation are particularly likely to benefit from compression, or from moving to a better modern image format - or moving videos off pages that you need to load faster.

If you can avoid having contact forms embedded in pages that need to load fast it is beneficial - the Recaptcha element of modern contact forms can slow down the page load speed. You should also see if there are settings to compress and aggregate javascript and CSS on your webpages, which will frequently improve load speed and reduce the number of individual requests that have to be sent in order to load the page. The more that individual pages on your website only load what they need to, the faster those pages will load and the happier your visitors will be.

We recommend using Cloudflare (or a similar content delivery network service) to reduce the effective distance of a visitor from your website server - this can have major benefits for latency (the time for a data packet to travel between the server and the web browser) when someone is browsing your website from a different country or continent. It also offers many other settings that will make your website load faster for the end user.

Ensuring that your website loads well and feels fast on mobile devices will help to improve the visitor's experience on your website when they come to it (as the majority of people do) on a phone. Some sites provide a poor user experience on mobile, because assets sized for desktop screens are being loaded, and layouts originally optimised for the desktop can feel cramped on smaller screens, even when they re-flow. Since the data speed on mobiles is often slower than on desktop computers, a site that works acceptably on a laptop or desktop computer may feel very sluggish on mobile.

It is harder to get the same scores on speed tests for mobile devices as on desktop devices, but ensuring a mobile website is not loading images that are as big as the ones loaded on the desktop version will help - and removing sliders with multiple images can make a big difference too.

Long-tail phrases for SEO

How people are searching in search engines has been changing to reflect their increased sophistication at delivering specific and relevant results in response to complex enquiries. Rather than searching for one-word keywords or two-word and three-word phrases, many users employ 'long-tail' keywords or ask direct natural language questions in search. A long-tail keyword is a search query that is over three words long and can be used to target specific topics or niche areas.

The increasing use of ChatGPT and similar Artificial Intelligence-based chatbots with large language models has intensified the trend towards long-tail searches, as users have come to expect that search engines can achieve comprehension of sophisticated and complex sentences.

Some mainstream search engines, such as Bing and Google, now actively incorporate AI-based direct responses as an alternative to conventional search results.

How targeting long-tail phrases can add value

1. Higher ranking - The narrower scope of a long-tail phrase means you have the potential to rank higher for directly relevant search queries, as the phrase used will be less competitive.
2. Qualified search intent - Users searching with more specific queries are likely to be closer to converting to making purchases or pre-sales enquiries, unless of course they are researching answers to questions.

Write your content with these considerations in mind, referencing those long-tail phrases that the target audience for your services or products might be searching for. Keep in mind how you can incorporate those phrases, and answer questions your users might be posing, within your content.

How Link-Building can benefit SEO work

Link-building is the collective name given to all activities aimed at getting external websites with useful levels of domain authority and visitor traffic to incorporate direct links to your website in theirs. Having multiple respected and frequently visited websites linking back to yours signals to Google that your site is authoritative and trustworthy.

How PR can help with Link-Building

Public Relations (PR) activity can be a useful part of your link-building strategy. Reach out to local journalists and writers who may be interested in your products, services or content, especially if you have a piece of news, a business achievement or a special event to report on that is likely to make a good story in the local or specialist press. You can try building relationships with contacts working in journalism, or use a PR consultancy that already has those connections.

Here are some ideas for the types of content that may attract press attention:

1. Newly-launched products or services
2. Your business USP – what are you doing differently to your competitors?
3. Opinion or thought leadership – voice your views on relevant industry-specific and business topics to show your expertise
4. The latest news or trends within your industry
5. Encouraging statistics highlighting the growth of your business or of general demand for your products or services
6. Survey or questionnaire results
7. Any show or special event where the public can meet you

A carefully-judged, targeted news release in these areas could lead to articles and mentions online and offline, or result in a local journalist asking you for comments for another article they are writing. Some online articles even display a direct link to your website.

Meta tags for better ranking

Meta tags are something that need maintaining on most websites. They help indicate to Google what the pages are about, and also help the end user decide whether to click through to your website from search results. Care needs to be taken to ensure that these are helpful and not over-optimised. Most website content-management systems will automatically generate them from the page title and content. but there is often room to improve something generated automatically. Custom meta tags are worth considering on more important site pages, and can help enhance their visibility in search and improve click-through rates.

For every page or post in a website, two key meta-tags can be manually written to influence how it is represented in and considered by search engines. These comprise the title tag – the headline featuring keywords of relevance to your page that is shown in search engine results pages – and the meta description – a couple of lines of additional free text about what users can expect from the page if they visit it. Google won't always display custom titles or meta descriptions, if it feels that it can show something more relevant or useful given the user's search and what it knows about the page.

Best practice tips for in-house writing of meta-tags include:

1. Place the keywords / phrases you most want the page to rank for at the start of the title tag. You can then use the remaining title tag space for other words that you want the page to rank for in combination with the primary keywords. Try to avoid simply having a 'list of keywords' which may be considered spammy.
2. Only include your company name in the title tags for the Contact and About pages – otherwise, it's taking up space that would be better used for other search keywords. Unless your company name / brand is shared by unrelated organisations (including companies, sports teams, bands etc.) on the web, anyone searching for it is likely to be able to find it at or near the top of the results. It’s generally better to use the available space in the title tag for keywords that are going to attract clicks from searches carried out by people looking for what you offer, rather than specifically for your business by name.
3. As far as possible, avoid duplication of the first phrase in the title tag across multiple inner site pages - repetition can appear like spam, though it’s acceptable for some important phrases to feature across more than one page.
4. The meta description, unlike the title tag, should typically read as a proper sentence, and can expand on the themes in the key phrases found in the title tag. Its purpose is to attract the reader to click through to the page, so use language that speaks appealingly to the end-user. If it reads badly or is not relevant to the page, Google may well ignore it.
5. Examine what your competitors are doing, if you can find similar sites which are ranking more highly than yours.

There are various online tools that can be used to check that title tags and meta descriptions are a sensible length, neither too short nor too long. This one, which precisely measures the number of horizontal pixels your tags will fill as compared with the available space, and also shows you a preview of what your search result will look like on the Google search results page: https://totheweb.com/learning_center/tool-test-google-title-meta-description-lengths/

Bear in mind that as with many factors determining your visibility, small changes can make a big cumulative difference but don't expect to see significant changes overnight. Try to ensure that changes you make for SEO never make a page read badly or have a negative impact on user experience - the way that the end user experiences your content is key, and no one likes pages that read awkwardly because target phrases have been dropped into them.

Google is also very aware of the sort of changes that get made to websites for SEO, and will try to ignore these where possible, to discourage website owners from making SEO changes that have a negative impact on end-users - what has sometimes been termed 'over-optimisation'.

Try to keep in mind that changes should ideally be done primarily to benefit your website visitors, and only secondarily for SEO purposes.