What’s Working for You in SEO This Year? Let’s Share Insights!

[katy529]

Hey everyone,

With all the constant changes in the SEO world — from Google’s algorithm updates to shifts in user behavior — I’m curious:

What SEO strategies are actually working for you in 2025?

Personally, I’ve been seeing solid results by focusing more on:

Optimizing for local intent (especially using Google Business Profile)

Cleaning up outdated content and refreshing it

Getting backlinks from real discussions on niche forums and blogs

Also started using a few tools to benchmark competitors and spot easy-win keywords. One of the most helpful for me has actually been the plain old Google Search — just digging deeper into SERP patterns, People Also Ask questions, and what type of content ranks.

Would love to hear:

What are you doubling down on?

Any tactics you’ve stopped using?

Favorite underrated SEO trick?

Let’s swap notes. Looking forward to hearing what’s working for others!

[Juniya]

Going back to the basics seems to be working best, focusing on creating content that people are searching for and fixing old content with updated structure of the post/page. Everything else is just luck or lack of at this point.

[tangor]

@katy529 ... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

Old style still works, in fact it might work even better since g got lost in the AI adventure. AI is actually pretty dumb and tends to bias in strange directions that humans will ignore and turn back to "searching the old way"... which makes g nervous and continue to keep doing things the "old way" at the same time.

PATIENCE is the biggest SEO criteria these days. There are no quick fix/tricks out there. g has coded in protections against such but have not actually changed their original ranking factors---just added a boatload more criteria which, oddly enough, seem to lean back toward what worked in 2000 instead of what got "broke" in 2021-2025.

WHAT HAS CHANGED is the ad landscape, court cases, world and national economies, war, supply chain disruptions and all kinds of other stuff. Once again, PATIENCE is required to get through this. The web will recover, SEO (as in optimizing for USERS and CONTENT and PRESENTATION) will remain in place, but the "seo" (note lower case) for generating ad income is largely gone and likely will not return to truly bankable proportions. (The game is rigged in the House Favor and always has been, only difference now is that g no longer hides that fact.)