How to Do SEO in 2025

If you’re a business owner who’s been trying to get your business found online, you’ve heard the term “SEO” many times by now. It’s a volatile term that is hard to pin down, but a simple definition is this: SEO is how effectively you capture visibility online. Businesses that do this well are poised to grow revenue, no matter their service or product niche. Let’s unpack some things to keep in mind as you’re learning how to do SEO well, which will ideally result in doing online business well.

1. Good SEO Has Value

If you want the top few spots on a Google search result about your business, your content must be the best and most valuable on your topic or service (or you need to run an ad, but more on that another time). Filling your website with press releases, keywords, and links to other websites won’t cut it. Google prioritizes content that helps users solve their problems quickly and effectively. This means your website should feature robust, well-researched, and highly useful content that directly answers peoples’ searches.

Key Considerations:

People want solutions, not keywords. If you’ve heard that how to do SEO is just a matter of putting the right keywords on your website, you’ve been misled. If your content doesn’t provide real answers, users will leave quickly, signaling to Google that your page lacks value. Yes, you need to utilize keywords, but keywords alone will not win you anything of value.

AI Overviews are changing the game. Google’s AI-generated summaries are increasingly pulling from solid website content. At that, they’re often the first thing you see when you type in a question into Google. If your content is well-structured, deeply informative, and authoritative, you stand a good chance to appear alongside major industry players in these overviews. Take for example our friends over at Grand Village Retirement. We’ve been partnering with them on creating meaningful content for over a year and they have consistently shown up in the AI overview for all things related to retirement in Arkansas.

2. Good SEO Has Signage

Imagine that you are looking for a children’s hospital. You see the highway sign on the interstate that says “Arkansas Children’s Hospital: Voted Best Care in the State” and in smaller letters “exit 52.” A few miles pass, you hit your blinker, and take the exit. A little ways down you see the “H” sign with an arrow pointing to the right. You take a right and after a mile, you make it to the parking lot. You walk inside and see the hallway signs, each pointing you to a more refined location within the building. SEO is much the same. You need “signs” to help people get to your business. These signs include social media profiles, Google My Business profiles, and the like. Learning how to do SEO well needs to include more than just one piece of online “signage.” Make yourself impossible to miss.

Key Considerations:

Post regularly to social media. This isn’t about “going viral.” People need to know you’re alive and doing good business. Social media helps tell the story of your business to your ideal customers, ideally nurturing them closer to becoming a customer.

Keep your online business listings up-to-date. Much like social media, people use Google Business profiles, Yelp profiles, and other listings to check for signs of life from your business. Posting updates, gathering good reviews, and updating photos are all great ways to keep this “sign” polished.

3. Good SEO Has Precision

Your business is probably a mix of general and specific elements. If you’re Ferrari, you’re a car company, but so is Nissan. The differences are obvious, but in order to capitalize on your online presence, you have to show it. Using well-researched keywords and valuable content, you need to tell Google that you are after a specific customer, not all the customers. More pointedly, SEO strategy that seeks to show up for everybody will ultimately show up for nobody.

Key Considerations:

Lean into your niche. One of the best things you can do as a business is embrace who you are. For example, our friends at 920D Custom create guitar wiring harnesses for professional musicians and hobbyists seeking to improve their guitar’s sound. They aren’t trying to be found on Google for people searching “electric guitar parts.” There are plenty of other businesses who will win that spot over them. Rather, they are in the top few spots very often for “loaded guitar pickguards.” Leaning into the specificity does them good and is a much more effective SEO strategy.

Speak your niche’s language. Your SEO is only as good as the language you wrap around it. Keep in mind that the words and phrases your customers actually use when searching may not always match the jargon you use internally. Your job is to think like they think, so you can speak how they speak in your website language.

If you’re at the end of this and wondering how to tackle it all, our best advice is to take a step back and remember your core identity and competencies as a business. Who are you, what do you do well, and what makes you different (and better) when compared to competitors? From there, start thinking about the value you can give people and how it connects to your business. Be loud about it, making sure your presentation of that value is everywhere it can be. Finally, be specific about what you do and don’t provide. Build your strategy around that and if you need people to strategize with, we’d love to talk about how to do SEO for your business in particular. Fill out a form below to get a free SEO audit and consult.