When most businesses think of SEO, they think of keywords, backlinks, and maybe meta descriptions if they’ve spent a few hours watching YouTube videos. But if you’re like most of the folks I work with—small business owners, creative professionals, service-based solopreneurs—you’re probably looking for someone to untangle the chaos. Not just throw out jargon. Because SEO doesn’t live in a vacuum. It lives in your messaging, your user experience, and how people feel after they click off your site.
As someone who builds websites that are more than just digital business cards, I’ve had a front row seat to what works (and what doesn’t) in today’s SEO landscape. Whether I’m building on Webflow or cleaning up an underperforming WordPress site, I always start with a holistic view: What kind of experience are we promising? Who are we trying to speak to? And how are we earning trust, click by click?
With that in mind, here are 8 proven SEO strategies you can use right now to boost your website’s ranking in 2025—and beyond. These aren’t hacks or quick wins. They’re sustainable, actionable strategies that anchor SEO deeply into the structure, performance, and narrative of your online presence.
In 2025, Google continues to evolve toward rewarding content depth and domain expertise. The days of spraying articles across every vaguely related keyword are behind us. If you're a business trying to compete for visibility, topical authority is the metric that matters most.
Topical authority means your site is considered a trusted source on a specific subject. Think of it like becoming the best café in your neighborhood for espresso—not every drink, just the one people know you for. Google notices when a site consistently produces thoughtful, interconnected content on a niche topic. That’s when you start rising in rankings, not just for one keyword, but for a whole cluster of search queries.
One of my clients, a home organizer in Nashville, used this method by focusing her entire blog strategy around “decluttering for neurodivergent individuals.” Instead of general decluttering tips, she created a web of content about time-blindness, sensory overwhelm, and habit stacking. As a result, she ranks on the first page for a cluster of highly relevant, low-competition terms—and her leads are incredibly aligned with her niche.
Want inspiration? Check out SEMrush's breakdown of topical authority — it’s technical but packed with helpful strategies.
No one wants to wait. In an age where even a 1-second delay means a 16% drop in customer satisfaction, page speed is no longer just an SEO metric—it’s an essential part of user experience. Google agrees. Your Core Web Vitals (which measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability) are now direct ranking factors.
Earlier this year, I worked with a real estate photographer who built his own Squarespace site. It looked okay… until the 8MB homepage took nearly 9 seconds to fully load. His bounce rate? 78%. After moving the gallery onto a CDN, compressing images with ShortPixel, and switching to a lightweight gallery layout, his page speed score jumped from 42 to 87 (mobile) in Google PageSpeed Insights. And here’s the magic: Within 2 months, he went from page 3 to page 1 for "Franklin TN real estate photographer."
Most of my Webflow projects consistently clock in at 90+ on mobile Core Web Vitals without much tinkering, because Webflow handles a lot of the heavy lifting bake-in. But if you're using WordPress or Wix, expect to do more manual cleanup.
This one’s personal. Because for years I’ve seen business owners fall into the trap of keyword stuffing, robotic headlines, and blog posts that feel like they were written by a disinterested AI. (Let’s be honest—some of them were.)
Here’s what I tell clients who want to improve SEO without sacrificing voice: Your unique perspective IS your competitive advantage. Google is not only understanding language better thanks to advances like BERT and MUM—it’s getting better at measuring engagement signals. If your content helps someone genuinely solve a problem, Google sees that behavior: longer dwell time, more clicks, fewer bounces.
One client I worked with, a financial coach for creatives, saw a 3x increase in her organic traffic after she rewrote key service pages with personal stories layered into the copy. For example, on her main “Budgeting Coaching” page, she shared how her first freelance tax season nearly broke her—but then showed how she designed her current system from that experience. Relatable, helpful, and SEO-friendly.
Remember, your clarity is someone’s beginning. You don’t need to prove you’re smart with complexity—prove you're helpful with simplicity.
There’s a hidden goldmine on your website—and it’s not your newest post. It’s your older content that’s quietly slipping down Google’s rankings. Updating existing posts (what we in the industry call “content refreshing”) remains one of most underused, high-impact SEO strategies in 2025.
Take this simple test: Pull a Google Search Console report of pages that lost clicks over the last 6 months. Is the information still relevant? Are the stats outdated? Could you add a new example or turn it into a listicle with better structure? I'd bet at least a few of those posts are due for a makeover—and the results can be wild.
For example, I refreshed a 2021 post entitled “Best Web Hosting for Small Businesses”—the original had outdated info, no internal links, and ranked #11 for its target term. After rewriting with current data, comparing top providers (Webflow, Kinsta, SiteGround), and improving H2 structure, it landed at #3 within 4 weeks.
Refreshing can be faster than writing from scratch, and you avoid reinventing the wheel. Let your previous effort keep working for you.
This one might hit home if you're a service-based business or brick-and-mortar store: Local SEO isn’t just about listings. It’s about building trust with the people already around you.
Optimizing for local means you’re helping Google—and real people—understand why your business matters in a specific place. At Zach Sean Web Design, I put real emphasis on geographic and cultural relevance. For example, I mention "Franklin, TN" in natural ways across my content: projects completed for local artists, stories about collaborating at Frothy Monkey, or regional SEO trends from Middle Tennessee.
One of my clients, a landscaping team, didn’t just add "Nashville" in their keywords—they started writing blog posts about “Best Trees to Plant in Nashville,” including local photos, testimonials from area neighborhoods like 12 South, and embedded maps. Their site became a local resource, not just a promotion.
Google’s local algorithm weighs proximity, prominence, and relevance. But for real humans, it’s all about familiarity. Be the business your neighbors already feel like they know.
Welcome to the age of featured snippets. You’ve probably already seen them—those smart-summarized answers that appear right at the top of Google search results. They’re what many call “position zero,” and they pull directly from your well-structured content.
Getting featured here doesn’t require magic—it requires precision. You need to format your answers clearly, place them high in the content, and optimize for questions people actually ask. Think step-by-step instructions, neatly formatted lists, or bite-size definitions.
I helped a therapist client earn a featured snippet for the term “signs of emotional burnout” by rewriting part of their post as a numbered list and moving it to the intro. Google picked it up within weeks, and their organic traffic jumped by 64%. Again, structure wins.
Not every SEO gain comes with a click. The goal is visibility, and snippets often deliver higher trust and recognition even if the user doesn’t visit your site. Weird, but powerful.
Internal linking isn’t glamorous, but it's one of the best on-page SEO moves you can make. Done right, it guides search engines through your site’s architecture and helps distribute link authority evenly. Done wrong, it’s just a clutter of random suggestions.
Here’s my rule: Every blog post should naturally link to at least 2 other pages—ideally one related service and one piece of deeper content. This “next step” approach mimics how real users would explore your ideas. It also gives Google a clearer map of your site’s structure.
For instance, after writing a post on “How to Use Webflow Collections for Client Projects,” I linked to a related piece on building CMS-powered portfolios. Both pages now rank higher, and readers stay on site longer because the navigation feels intuitive.
Think of your website like a city: If the roads between neighborhoods (aka your pages) are clear and intentional, people stay longer and explore more.
Finally, no SEO campaign is complete without analytics. If you’re not measuring behavior, keyword positions, and click-through rates, you’re flying blind. But more importantly: You need to act on what you learn.
I use Google Search Console and GA4 daily for client sites—and no, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. A monthly review of top queries, top exit pages, and mobile performance reveals more than annual reports ever could.
One client in the e-commerce space was struggling with declining conversions from Google traffic. When we drilled down, we found 60% of organic traffic was going to outdated category pages. We redirected those pages to live SKUs, updated the meta descriptions, and watched conversions climb by 18% in the next 30 days.
The more you treat data like a conversation instead of a report card, the more useful it becomes. Ask yourself: What is this number trying to tell me about my visitors’ experience?
SEO in 2025 isn’t about tricking the algorithm. It’s about aligning your expertise, your messaging, and your site’s infrastructure to earn trust—both from search engines and real humans. It requires intention. It requires empathy. And it definitely rewards those who take the long view.
If you’re building a Webflow site, tightening up an old WordPress install, or just trying to finally rank higher for your dream keyword, remember that each piece of your website is a conversation starter. From clarity in your copy to structure in your links and speed in your load times, your site is constantly whispering to Google about the quality of what you do.
So lean in. Build authority, refresh old gold, write to be useful, and make your digital home just as inviting as your real one.
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