5 Things to Know About Digital Marketing in 2025

Digital marketing has changed a lot over the past few years, and the pace of innovation is unlikely to slow in 2025.

From emerging technologies and changes in consumer behavior to increasing competition within your vertical, there’s always a new challenge around the corner.

You have to adapt to thrive, and that requires an understanding of where digital marketing is heading. To help support your adaptation and growth in 2025, here are five vital ways digital marketing will evolve this year.

Becoming an authority in your field is essential to maximizing online visibility. But you can’t achieve this recognition without first solidifying your brand in the eyes of users, search engines, and other popular platforms.

Users have access to a greater variety of platforms than ever before, and improved search functionality means users can search wherever they are. Google itself has introduced new ways to search as well, including Lens enhancements, Circle to Search, and more.

A well-established brand builds trust, driving not just better visibility across platforms but also more effective traffic conversion. It also helps dominate branded searches, which signals to search engines that your offerings are in demand, translating into improved visibility, revenue, and growth.

Establishing your brand all starts with high-quality content that gives users exactly what they’re looking for. Crucially, your content should exemplify E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Recently, the folks at Google Search clarified that E-E-A-T isn’t something you can simply “add” to your website. It has to be built into your brand from the ground up, so assembling a team of genuine experts will pay dividends in the long run.

Craft content with terms like “value add” and “information gain” in mind. Your content must offer unique value to achieve topical authority within your vertical.

Focus on writing comprehensively on each topic (building pillar content over time), satisfying user intent with each piece (i.e., are you trying to help them learn, complete a task, or make a purchase?), and discussing your brand’s unique value proposition where appropriate (but never force this, similar to how we avoid keyword stuffing).

Maintaining a regularly updated blog is a necessity. Optimized blog posts drive top-of-funnel traffic, attract links from other sites to build your backlink profile, and show search engines that you’re invested in providing valuable resources to users. In other words, it shows that you’re user-oriented.

Strategic content syndication is also effective for expanding reach, building brand authority, and driving referral traffic. It’s best to first publish the original content on your site, then use canonical tags pointing back to your original page when syndicating.

In 2025, brands without a serious content strategy run a very real risk of seeing their Organic Search visibility evaporate.

The most prominent and widely used AI search experience is Google’s AI Overview. It’s been a sore subject for many marketers who see this feature as a click-through thief and an unwelcome occupier of the most valuable real estate on SERPs, pushing the top organic results down well below the fold.

Google also started using AI to organize SERPs, enabling further personalization for users. However, this change caused more volatility for digital marketing teams working to cement their landing pages among the top organic positions.

And that’s just Search itself. We haven’t even gotten to tools like ChatGPT Search and Perplexity eating into Google’s long-dominant market share, leading some developers to start creating llms.txt files to help optimize their sites for LLMs.

Google and the other big players continue to make AI tools more widely available to consumers and professionals. For example, Google has already released Gemini 2.5 to the public, Bing’s AI-powered Copilot Search is publicly available, and we’re seeing further proliferation of AI agents in places like Microsoft’s security ecosystem.

AI will continue to change how we search and optimize for online visibility in 2025 and beyond. If you aren’t sure how to navigate the increasingly rapid and complex changes driven by AI, the best way to get started is by trying out various AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity for yourself.

Thanks to AI, searches are becoming more conversational, allowing users to interact more naturally for better results. Counterintuitively, the introduction of AI is contributing to search experiences that feel more human.

AI is far more than window dressing, but digital marketers need to understand that the fundamentals of SEO will remain essential in 2025 and beyond.

Here are some specific items that digital marketers should continue to optimize:

Don’t forget about other technical elements such as URL structure, responsive design to ensure mobile friendliness, accessibility items, etc.

Beyond these tasks, there are some core principles that digital marketers should keep in mind, as well.

Search engines like Google are increasingly geared toward helping users complete the task that inspired their query. If you want your landing page to rank highly on SERPs, it needs to match the user’s search intent.

For example, someone using the keyword “organic coffee” will see a SERP full of product listings and options for immediately buying organic coffee online.

On the other hand, someone searching “organic coffee shop” will see a local pack and “near me” results that show them where they can enjoy a cup of organic coffee locally.

While not a ranking factor, Google’s E-E-A-T is a crucial set of factors that content and pages should demonstrate to be considered “high quality.”

The acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The first three are all considered elements of the fourth, i.e., a page would be considered trustworthy if it demonstrated experience, expertise, and authoritativeness.

Tips for building content that exemplifies E-E-A-T:

Review Google’s Spam Policies and ensure your content and processes are fully compliant to avoid poor quality ratings, penalties, or manual actions.

For years now, Google and other search engines have been able to understand semantics. For example, Google knows your page is about moisturizing sunscreen with SPF, even if an exact mention of the keyword “moisturizing sunscreen with SPF” doesn’t appear on the page itself.

Remember, keyword density isn’t a thing. Don’t trust the outdated SEO plugin in your CMS telling you otherwise.

In the age of AI search and Natural Language Processing, focus on incorporating topically relevant entities rather than specific keywords into your content.

Entities are the nouns (people, places, things, ideas, etc.) that help search engines understand web pages. Through vectoring, search engines can understand the relationships between various entities, which helps paint a clear picture of what your page is about.

Just like keyword stuffing, you wouldn’t want to “entity-stuff,” either. However, thoughtful inclusion of related entities is key to ensuring your pages are seen as relevant, helpful, and high-quality.

The notion of a TikTok ban caused quite an uproar, which should tell you everything you need to know about the value of video content in the modern marketplace.

Ordinary users reacted strongly, but the loudest voices against the idea of a ban were business owners and digital marketers who leverage the platform to drive business.

Hesitant about delving into video content? Keep in mind that the top-performing videos are almost always cheaply produced (done entirely on your phone), short one-shots (no need for grandiose enhancements or significant editing), and personable (simply speak from the heart, no script required).

Interactive content is great for engagement and gives your brand further opportunities for UX personalization, making it a worthwhile investment across industries.

There’s still a balance to be struck on interactivity, though. After all, does anyone actually enjoy picking up the remote and choosing which car insurance commercial to watch while streaming?

But done correctly, interactive content will spark users’ interest and spur them to take action. At worst, it helps build brand awareness.

There was a period when unexpected personalization gave users the “ick.” But personalization has become normalized and even expected.

People aren’t going to read, watch, or click on things that don’t interest them.

It really is that simple.

AI’s ability to analyze real-time user behavior and use it to deliver the content and ads users want to see will drive personalization to new heights in 2025.

Dynamic content that adjusts based on contextual triggers is an excellent place to start. Explore options for your business to leverage predictive analytics to forecast behavior based on unified data.

Omnichannel personalization is now within reach as well, thanks to AI-driven customer journeys and increasingly deep integration of AI into the leading digital marketing platforms.

As with everything AI, it’s best to start small and scale based on performance.

But considering how far AI has come (and the increasingly rapid pace of advancement), as well as the availability of privacy-centric tactics that comply with regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA, there’s never been a better time to devote resources to hyper-personalization.

VELOX is an ROI-focused digital marketing agency that uses the latest research, a leading-edge tech stack, and proven techniques to drive exponential growth for your business.

With thorough keyword research and our New Revenue Model, we devise and execute fully custom strategies that conservatively target 400-800% ROI. On top of that, we routinely exceed client expectations, which is why we’re recognized as a Google Partner.

Are you poised to achieve sustained search dominance in 2025? Contact VELOX today for your free marketing plan.