To operate a business in 2025, you need eyes on your website – it’s where you teach people who you are, gather leads and often where you make sales. While there are lots of ways to get online attention, search engine optimization (SEO) is the gold standard. That’s because organic search results bring in 53 percent of all web traffic.
SEO is essential – but it also requires catering to search algorithms that don’t “think” the same way that your human customers do. It can be easy to focus so much on optimizing for search engines that you forget to optimize for your customers’ experience, too. Read on for some tips about how to appeal to algorithms without alienating your people.
What is SEO, again?
You’ve probably heard the term SEO, or search engine optimization, before. SEO is the practice of designing your website and its content to show up on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain keywords and keyphrases. For example, if you run a commercial photography business in Boise, you would want your website to appear near the top of SERPs for keyphrases like “professional headshots boise” or “business portraits boise”.
Optimizing for search includes technical changes to site architecture and making sure your site loads quickly – also things that help human readers of your site. The area where the demands of SEO and the needs of your audience are more likely to clash is content or on-page optimization, which includes things like keywords, images with alt text, and content structure.
Why SEO matters for entrepreneurs
In 2025, search engine optimization is not optional. Appearing high in the results of searches relevant to your business is crucial to draw potential customers to the top of your marketing and sales funnel.
SEO can bring a lot of customers into your funnel – remember that 53 percent statistic? And, unlike pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, SEO keeps working without the need to continuously pay for it. Content you put on your site now can keep bringing searches in for years, and a good SEO strategy can drastically increase the traffic you receive. That same content can also keep customers interested once they arrive at your site, show them your expertise, and convince them of your business’s value. But it can only do that if your SEO strategies balance SEO for algorithms with the experience of your readers.
SEO should serve your customers first
The purpose of SEO is to help technology find your site for people. But unless those people find your content interesting, helpful, and memorable, they’ll bounce right back off your site after finding it in the search results.
A lot of people writing for their website focus so much on the whims of search algorithms that they forget they need to capture their customers’ attention and draw them in. If your content is not serving your human readers, it’s not fulfilling its purpose.
Our 2025 SEO strategies
To serve humans as well as algorithms, we recommend:
- Using keyphrases thoughtfully. If you jam keywords and keyphrases into your web content in a frenzy, hoping to capture Google’s attention, your readers will notice. Those who don’t know about SEO will find your content confusing, and those who do will feel like you care more about clicks than about quality.
- Using alt text for accessibility, not just SEO. Image descriptions are an important accessibility tool for blind and low-vision people. While you can and should use alt text as part of your SEO strategy, make sure you’re also using it to provide a useful description of your images. Here are some alt text best practices to get you started.
- Focusing on readability. One of the most harmonious parts of SEO is readability. Search algorithms favor content that’s clear, concise, and divided into easily consumable chunks under descriptive headers. Just make sure your headers are relevant to the section of the article or page they appear over. Both humans and search algorithms also prefer when you use bulleted lists rather than listing items out in one long sentence.
- Being original. Regurgitating someone else’s highly ranked content is a bad look to both your readers and to search engines. While it’s fine to take inspiration from the current top search results for your keywords, your content should include your own insights and perspective. And avoid using copy directly from tools like ChatGPT or Claude – search engines now lower the rank of pages that use AI-generated content. Your organization’s uniqueness is part of what draws customers in. Why not show it?
Search engine empathy
Overall, it’s hard to go wrong with SEO if you lead with empathy. Thinking about what your customers want, need and worry about will help you create content they’ll search for and find helpful. And creating a good experience for them on your website will make them more likely to consider working with you. Being likeable goes a long way.
If you’re keyword planning now, you might find our article Boost Your SEO: Grab Your Keyword Planner! helpful. Now go make yourself more findable!
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