Which UX Signals Is Google Using in 2025?

Which UX Signals Is Google Using in 2025?

Apr 21, 2025

Reading Time: 3 minutes
Which UX Signals Is Google Using in 2025?

Back in the dark ages of the Internet, when practices like keyword stuffing and spammy backlinks were rewarded with top search rankings, user experience was a secondary concern, mainly because those who focused on it ended up lower down on the SERPs. However, UX is now a core ranking factor, and those who don’t pay attention to it are likely to miss out. Google has always tried to prioritize user experience (thus the numerous core updates), but how its algorithm measures UX has changed over time.

User experience may be one of the most important factors in search rankings, other than keywords. If users aren’t having a good experience on your site, they won’t stay, and your search rankings will suffer because of it.

How Does Google Measure User Experience?

Google is a search engine that uses an algorithm to match users with content based on search terms. How can it tell whether someone is having a good experience on a website or not? And while Google can’t really tell how you’re feeling, there are some signals that it can measure. For example, if a website isn’t loading quickly enough, it’s not what you’re looking for, or it’s got loud autoplaying ads that you can’t pause, you aren’t likely to stay on that website. Google can measure how long users stay on a site before returning to the SERP–the dwell time–and can interpret a very short dwell time as an indicator that it wasn’t the right fit, while a longer dwell time would be a signal of a better user experience.

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The following are some of the UX signals that Google typically considers when adjusting SERP rankings:

  • Dwell time
  • Click-through rate (CTR)
  • Pogo-sticking
  • Load speed
  • Responsive design
  • Clickable elements aren’t too close to each other
  • Readable text and font sizes
  • Accessible color contrast
  • Semantic HTML
  • Screen reader support
  • No intrusive pop-ups
  • No autoplaying videos
  • Logical site hierarchy
  • Breadcrumb navigation
  • Anchor text
  • Scannable content
  • And more

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What’s New in UX Signals?

The above UX signals are all things that Google has been measuring for years. In 2025, these are still important signals because the information they provide has continued to be useful in indicating user experience. However, that doesn’t mean that Google isn’t continually looking at what works and making changes as needed. A new UX signal that Google has begun monitoring is Interaction to Next Paint (INP).

What Is Interaction to Next Paint (INP)?

Interaction to Next Paint is a metric that measures web performance. First introduced in a Google core update in early 2024, it replaced First Input Delay (FID) because it was considered to be a more accurate indicator of user experience. INP measures the time in between a user’s interactions with the website (be it clicking, tapping, typing, or something else) and the time the next frame is painted on the screen. What this boils down to is that INP measures how long it takes for a website to respond to a user’s actions.

What Is the Difference Between INP and FID?

FID, or First Input Delay, measured much the same thing, except that it measured only the very first interaction. INP takes that many steps further and continually monitors the website’s response time after a user interaction. It’s more accurate than FID because it paints a bigger picture. FID might miss later delays beyond the first one.

Why Is INP So Important?

INP is an excellent indicator of user experience because, simply put, the longer a website takes to load, the more likely a user is to leave unless they really, really want to be on that site. INP is an indicator of website loading speed and responsiveness (200 milliseconds or less is considered good), and the faster a site can load after a user interaction, the better that user’s experience with the site.

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Why Keyword Research Is the Foundation of Great Content

Why Keyword Research Is the Foundation of Great Content

Mar 21, 2025

Reading Time: 3 minutes
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While it may seem like online marketing and SEO are constantly changing, some things have stayed pretty much the same since the beginning. Keyword research, and how important it is to creating great content and making sure that that content gets found online, is one of those things. No matter what your goal is, whether it’s to drive traffic to your website or to convert visitors into customers, keyword research lays the groundwork for achieving it.

What Is Keyword Research?

While at its heart, keyword research is simply the process of identifying which words and phrases people are using when searching for information online, it’s also much more than that. It’s through keyword research that you learn what your customers are thinking, how they’re feeling, and their intent when they search. Through keyword research, you can learn what your audience and customers actually want, so you don’t have to guess when it comes to planning your content.

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Keyword Research Is More Than Just Keywords

Modern keyword research isn’t stuffing your content with as many keywords as you can. In fact, that’s a good way to run afoul of Google’s algorithm and earn a drop in the SERP rankings. What keyword research is instead is a blueprint. It’s the foundation that you’ll use to build your content strategy. Keywords are important, but unless you’re using them strategically, you may end up with content that just doesn’t land quite right with your audience.

How Does Keyword Research Guide Content Creation?

There are a number of ways in which keyword research should guide your content creation strategy:

1. Topic Selection

You shouldn’t choose which topics to write about in a vacuum. Keyword research lets you know what people are searching for. You can see the search volume for each keyword or key phrase that is relevant to your industry and find the sweet spot of popular but not so popular that your content would be drowned out in a sea of everyone else writing about the same thing.

2. Content Structure

Once you know what you’re writing about, your keyword research will go a step further and can help you plan out the structure of your content. For example, the title, headings, sub-headings, and more. Each sub-section on a webpage has a chance of ranking individually on Google, so it’s important to pay attention to these, too.

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3. Discoverability

Google can’t match searchers with your content if there’s nothing linking the two together. That’s where keywords come in. A user searches for a particular keyword or phrase, and because that word or phrase is included in your content (especially if it’s in the title or a header), Google knows to pair users with your content. Without keywords, your content just isn’t as discoverable.

4. Low-Competition Keywords

Keyword research also helps you to identify gaps in your competitors’ content. Look for high search volume but low competition keywords–these are the ones that people are looking for but no one else is really writing about yet. That’s a gap you can take advantage of so that Google can send those users your way.

5. Content ROI

Without doing keyword research ahead of time, you may end up with a lot of content that just doesn’t perform very well. That’s because it was created based on guesswork. With keyword research, however, you can take the guesswork out of it and make each webpage more valuable because you already know people are searching for content like it.

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How SEO Has Changed in 2025

How SEO Has Changed in 2025

Feb 7, 2025

Reading Time: 3 minutes
How SEO Has Changed in 2025

We’ve been hearing a lot of digital marketers say that SEO is dead. However, this is far from true. These reports of SEO being dead or otherwise useless in 2025 may be a reaction to how the SEO landscape has changed with generative AI. That doesn’t mean SEO is dead, though. Far from it, in fact! It’s just different than it used to be, and that’s okay. SEO has been changing for decades in reaction to Google updates and other factors that have impacted the SEO landscape. SEO will evolve again to meet new needs.

Why Are People Saying SEO Is Dead?

Those who say that SEO is “dead” do so for the following reasons:

  1. Google’s Helpful Content updates and AI-driven ranking systems reduce the effectiveness of certain SEO tactics.
  2. AI-generated search results take up a large portion of the top of the SERP, pushing traditional website results further down the page.
  3. Zero-click search results from the Featured Snippet, local pack, knowledge panels, and Google’s Search Generative Experience mean that users don’t have to click away from the SERP to get their questions answered.
  4. Ads and paid promotions also take up much of the SERP, pushing organic results further down the page and making organic SEO more competitive.

 

 

 

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Why SEO Is Still Alive in 2025

Despite all of these changes, SEO is still alive and well and as essential as it was before for getting found online. It’s just that it’s different from how it was at the beginning. But that’s a process that has been in progress for a long time, ever since Google’s first major update, the Panda Update. Before that, SEO was kind of a Dark Age of black hat SEO techniques that let people game search engines and spam them with low-quality content, edging out the actual good content that people were looking for.

What Doesn’t Work Anymore in 2025?

A lot of what doesn’t work anymore is SEO techniques that look to game the system, just like the black hat SEO of old. While these techniques aren’t as egregious as they used to be, thanks to Google’s many core updates since then, Google has been gradually pushing for the SEO techniques that are more focused on quality content and user experience than anything else.

What SEO Techniques Should You Use in 2025?

Because of Google’s emphasis on higher quality content and also the increased presence of AI and ads, the best approach to SEO in 2025 is twofold: focus on quality content and focus on what can rank at the top of the SERP.

 

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EEAT

High quality content focuses on experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Aiming for these four qualities will ensure that your content is consistently able to rank well on SERPs. Even though the top spot might be a bit farther down the page than it used to be, it’s still worth trying to rank for because not every SERP has such a big AI section. Even if the SERP does, there are still users who look for actual sites rather than just trusting the AI to be correct.

The main thing, however, is to focus on the type of content that AI can’t provide. That’s where your own lived human experiences come into play.

Featured Snippets and Videos

Another option is ranking at the top of the SERP within the generative AI section. While much of what ends up here is paid ads, there are still featured snippets and videos that are placed right at the top of the page. Creating a YouTube video strategy can help you to rank well on both Google and on YouTube, which is a search engine itself. To try to rank as the featured snippet, you can use long-tail keywords to answer questions directly. This means that sections within a page can rank rather than just a page by itself.

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Is Answer Engine Optimization the Future of SEO?

Is Answer Engine Optimization the Future of SEO?

Jan 8, 2025

Reading Time: 2 minutes
Is Answer Engine Optimization the Future of SEO

By now you’ll have noticed the generative AI section that appears at the top of most Google SERPs. This generative AI answer has been driving search results further and further down the SERP, meaning that the top search result doesn’t mean quite as much as it used to. This doesn’t mean that your SEO efforts are useless, however. But we now have a name for the strategy of optimizing specifically for generative AI: answer engine optimization (AEO).

What Is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of optimizing digital content so that it provides quick, concise, and accurate answers to user queries—often in the form of featured snippets, knowledge panels, or other instantly visible answers on search results pages. While traditional search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on ranking as high as possible for relevant keywords, AEO goes one step further by tailoring content to directly answer the specific questions users are asking.

What Is the Difference Between AEO and SEO?

AEO is a specific strategy that falls under the umbrella of SEO. SEO seeks to optimize for all parts of the search engine through a variety of strategies, including link-building and keyword research.  AEO, on the other hand, is more focused on answering specific user queries. Although the presence of AI is relatively new, the core concept of AEO isn’t actually new. It’s very similar to strategies for the featured snippet or for voice search.

What Are Key AEO Strategies?

Fortunately, the core strategies for AEO aren’t that different from what you should already have been doing. The following are things you can do specifically for AEO but also to maintain a good SEO strategy overall.

Long-Tail Keywords

Focusing on long-tail keywords has already been a strategy for voice-activated devices and apps like Siri and Alexa. People tend to ask questions like they’re talking to another person when they use a voice search rather than typing a few keywords into the search engine. Generative AI is no different. People chat with it like it’s a person, so the same strategy of optimizing for long-tail keywords can apply here, too.

Leverage FAQs

FAQs are an example of this strategy in action. There’s one question highlighted and answered concisely. This is the type of answer that can be featured in the generative AI section because it’s structured as a quick answer. You can use bullet points, clear headings (that are long-tail keywords) and a concise answer directly beneath the heading that is either the entire answer or summarizes longer-form content below.

EEAT

Google has long stated that high-quality content is what the company wants to deliver to its searchers. Generative AI hasn’t changed that. In fact, high quality content across the board can increase your chances of getting the featured snippet because you’ve established your site’s trustworthiness and authority in the subject. It’s a good idea to continue to produce the best possible content you can and even to go through older content to make sure that it’s still accurate and up-to-date.

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How Generative AI Is Impacting SEO in 2024

How Generative AI Is Impacting SEO in 2024

Jul 15, 2024

Reading Time: 3 minutes
How Generative AI Is Impacting SEO in 2024

You may have noticed that when you search for something on Google, you get a response from generative AI at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). This is Google Search Generative Experience, or Google SGE, and it’s been gradually changing the landscape of the SERP and thus, of SEO, as it is rolled out across more and more search queries. But what, exactly, does this mean for SEO?

How Does Google Search Generative Experience Affect the Search Engine Results Page?

The primary effect is that the number 1 search result, a highly prized ranking, is much further down on the SERP. The top of the screen is taken up by sponsored ads, generative AI, and YouTube videos. Users have to scroll down to see even the first result on many SERPs, let alone those lower ranked. This makes that top spot much less valuable because generative AI may have already answered the user’s question, reducing the likelihood that they will scroll down to see the web pages that have ranked for that query.

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What Can We Do To Compete With Generative AI?

In many ways, we can’t compete with generative AI. However, that doesn’t mean that we’re out of the SEO game. Even as SEO is changing to reflect the presence of generative AI, there are strategies we can focus on to help users find our content.

1. Improve Your Local SEO

Local SEO is going to be increasingly important as generative AI takes over more of the regular SERPs. If a user searches for a keyword in a specific location (for example, “Detroit coffee shop” or “Mexican restaurant near me”), then Google provides a Google map result with the Google Business Profile entries for local businesses that fit the search criteria. If you have a physical location for your business, then filling out this profile in full can help people to find you.

2. Get Into the YouTube Game

YouTube is a search engine in its own right and many people are turning to videos over written content. This presents an opportunity for ranking within YouTube as well as ranking at the top of the Google SERP, which does, depending on the query, include relevant YouTube videos in the generative AI section of the SERP. This represents an opportunity to appear at the top of the SERP, above the top search result in addition to within YouTube’s own search algorithm, providing two places to rank with one video.

3. Focus on Expertise and Experience

Google has long recommended following the EEAT (formerly EAT) guidelines to produce high-quality content: expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. Generative AI may be useful for many things, but it cannot replicate human experience. Focusing on your expertise and experience within your field can provide insights that no generative AI can offer. This type of content could attract users who are looking for something more than the more generic responses that AI could provide.

4. Keep Humans Involved

Perhaps the most important thing is to remember that, despite the involvement of AI, Google’s aim is predominantly to connect people with the best possible answers. AI cannot understand people the way people do, so people should therefore be involved in every step of your content creation process, even if you use generative AI yourself. This is because AI can make errors or may misunderstand human emotions and experiences. Having everything at a minimum reviewed by a human maintains a personal touch and increases accuracy. On top of that, it provides something that AI can’t, which is what can compete with AI online.

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How Can You Use AI To Produce High-Quality Written Content?

How Can You Use AI To Produce High-Quality Written Content?

Jun 10, 2024

Reading Time: 3 minutes
How Can You Use AI To Produce High-Quality Written Content

Generative AI like ChatGPT has been controversial since its release in 2022. Some have wholeheartedly embraced the new technology, while others were resistant to its adoption, concerned about what such technology might mean for their industries. And while nothing can replace human experience, creativity, insight, and strategy, we shouldn’t ignore tools that can help us write better.

So how can writers use generative AI as a tool?

#1: Don’t Let AI Be the Writer

The most important thing is for the writer to still be a person. Replacing writers with generative AI will remove that human creativity and insight from content. Plus, it could also harm SEO strategies; Google’s latest core update (the March 2024 one that took a whopping 45 days to completely roll out) included an improved spam filter intended to eliminate the usage of AI to mass-produce content in order to manipulate search engines. However, if your goal is to use AI in order to create the best possible content for your audience, then you can still use the tool; Google has its own AI tools and isn’t looking to ban its usage altogether.

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#2: Reduce Time Spent on Research

Writers may have to be experts in a lot of different topics; this means a lot of research that can take a long time. It might even take longer than the writing itself! Depending on the topic, though, AI can help with the research process and make it go a bit faster. ChatGPT shouldn’t be where you do your research because AI can hallucinate, provide inaccurate information, and may not have access to the latest data. But in subjects where the research is particularly complex, AI can help to simplify difficult subjects more quickly.

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#3: Create a Content Strategy

Another way AI can be used as a writing tool is to generate ideas for content. For example, if you’re planning a blog, you can ask ChatGPT to suggest topics to you. Not all of them will be ones you’ll want to use because you know your audience better than AI does, but AI can provide a list of possibilities that you can choose from, which is faster than brainstorming from scratch.

#4: Produce an Outline

Similarly, you can ask ChatGPT or another generative AI program to produce an outline on a specific topic for you. This can provide you with ideas for what you should discuss in your writing. Of course, you should only use what actually works for your content but using AI for this can help to reduce the planning time for your content.

#5: Clean Up Your Writing

Another option for AI usage is to ask it to improve your content after it’s written. Grammarly and other spell checkers typically find typos and grammar and spelling errors, but generative AI can take that a step further. For example, if you know that you tend to be wordy in your writing, you can ask ChatGPT for suggestions on how to make a paragraph more concise.

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#6: Keep Your Audience in Mind

No matter how you use AI, make sure to keep your audience in mind. Google’s updates are all to improve their search results for users. If your end goal is to produce the highest possible quality content for your audience and everything you do is towards that goal, then your content will more likely be in keeping with Google’s standards than if you’re doing it to game the algorithm and manipulate your way into higher rankings.

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