Prepare for 2025 with technological updates that optimize website resources, increase visibility and boost SEO performance.
For SEO professionals, a new year approach is an important time to conduct a technical SEO audit to assess how well clients' or employers' websites perform in search results.
Below are the key tasks to prioritize in 2025 to lay the foundation for a successful year in SEO.
1. Learn and strengthen business positions about LLM bots: ChatGPT is not affecting Google's market share. Monthly visitors in September were estimated at 3.7% of Google's 82 billion visits. (Note, however, that these inspections are partial.)
This is a reminder to those who think that ChatGPT and the Large Language Model (LLM) will rule the web. Now that they're far from it, that doesn't mean they don't matter.
ChatGPT and other LLMs are still more than two years away. Now, CTOs, legal teams and business leaders need to have clear policies on how to use and manage search engines as internal tools or external tools. Do not misunderstand their position.
We are currently in an era where Pandora's box has been opened. Despite the many examples of copyright infringement, we cannot deny the fact that most of the open web is crawled and most of the LLM is accessed.
This is not a chapter we can easily turn back to. Although I don't generally favor LLMs, they are an important consideration for future brand and website visibility. LLM like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and others should include your website.
LLM includes using a few ways to report on traffic or visibility in AI Overview: Regex for reporting GA4 on referrers from various common LLMs. Third-party tools like Semrush, Ahrefs and Ziptie that report AI overview visibility.
However, if your business decides not to include itself in the indexes of various LLMs, make sure you follow the proper documentation from each platform:
1.OpenAI.
2.Common Crawl.
3.Google: Google's advice is not to block Google-Extended, but to use the nosnippet preview control.
4.Perplexity.
5.Microsoft Copilot.
Many other LLMs don't share their bot naming data publicly, so you'll need to analyze a log file to block them, as this Akamai forum user did with CloudBot. (I can't find Anthropologie documentation that confirms it's their bot name or their IP range, so proceed with caution.)
2. View Structured Data in Your Page: Template Structured data here means much more than schema markup. Again, with LLM and de-contextualized snippets in mind (Think Google's passage ranking system), your page content should be properly coded and formatted according to what they are or what they represent.
It means:
1.Table should be used <table>, <th> and <tr>.
2.Headings should be used sequentially <h> tags from 1-6.
3.Must be the link <a href> and not <button>.
4.HTML rich markup should be used for things like block quotes, asides, and videos.
This often takes more effort and discussion than expected, especially if your website relies heavily on JavaScript frameworks, so don't skip this step.
Try adding structured data to your product pages in feature set lists and schema markup, among other opportunities to add as much "pure data" to your website as possible.
3. Work in the margins, find the 1% fixes: We are hitting an inflection point with the sheer number of documents to parse on the web. We will soon reach a point where the challenge is no longer ranking, but indexing or even crawling.
Because of my conservatism and caution, those 1% technical fixes that are being pushed back are starting to feel like an existential crisis.
All of which allows Google to take over your site and decide that it’s no longer worth crawling or indexing.
So, go back and pull some of those 1% corrections that have consistently been put aside. The things you said earlier weren't worth your dev team's time or effort.
Christmas is coming up - if you don’t have a code freeze and an ecommerce site, things might be quiet.
Look at things like:
1.Duplicate og: tags, titles, descriptions or any other meta tags.
2.Old plugins that are disabled but not deleted.
3.Image sizes.
4.Duplicate mobile and desktop navigation.
5.Deprecated or duplicate tags in Tag Manager, Segment, etc.
6.Installation of Duplicate Tag Manager. (Do you have the code for Google Optimize installed yet?)
7.Invalid JavaScript on site.
8.Accessibility issues, HTML or CSS compliance issues (reported by W3C).
9.Old pages or posts that are server level drafts should be deleted.
The 1% fixes are specific to your team and website, but these are some common ones. Review them and start adding to your tickets.
4. Look into new properties: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (including libraries and frameworks) are always evolving, and Google is constantly introducing new ways to make our work more efficient and faster.
Many of these changes will help us with SEO, including:
1.Prerendering: Basically, you can use this resource guide to find out what page Google will visit next, which can be displayed in advance at the end.
2.Content visibility: This is primarily download wise, but for content and images. This makes the initial loading time faster.
If you're looking for an opportunity to move the needle on the bleeding edge, Google's developer blogs are a good place to start.
Links to your page speed test report should also include information about possible ways to slow down the site, such as cutting optimizations or optimizing windows.
These changes can take a lot of time and effort, so discuss these important actions with your team and get clear on what they mean.
If it’s a choice between a 1% correction and that, I personally prefer to tackle known technical debt first unless the improvement from a 1% correction is substantial (30% or more).
5. Sunset has been running any 301 for more than a year:
Historically, I’ve defended that 301 revision forever, but I’m starting to change my mind.
Why?
When you have a huge list of 301 redirects, the server has to read each line when a page loads. This takes time and resources, which are becoming scarcer and more valuable.
Google's position is to keep 301 redirects for one year. Unless you have strong evidence from your own analytics platform that your old URLs are getting significant traffic, save the resources you have. Remove 301 redirects older than one year.
6. Consolidate content: I know this isn't technical SEO, but it has to do with resource management, like sunsetting your year-old 301 redirects.
The more content you have, the heavier your website will be, the more pages will need to be crawled and indexed.
If you have similar content from 2013, 2017 and 2022, consider combining them for both crawl management and visibility, rather than having separate pages for each.
Group your content to answer questions without targeting specific keywords.
Technical SEO is fundamental. There are other considerations with technical SEO that are not covered here as they should be part of our default checks, such as:
1.Internal links are checked to see if there are hops or if they are broken.
2.Site security management.
3.Implementing 301 redirects and managing 404.
4.Having a consistent site structure.
I believe, the points shared above will become more important in technical SEO moving forward. Now is the time to implement revisions and updates to strengthen the foundation for sustainable success in 2025.
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