Build trust and focus on brand awareness

Rana says: “Everything is changing, so build trust and focus on brand awareness for your clients.”

Why do you believe that traditional metrics are losing their importance?

“In the SEO world, we live with change, but what’s going on now is changing everything. We have witnessed a change in the ranking of websites, for example. SERPs are moving and some websites that have always been in the top positions are losing out to new websites.

Of course, we also have the SGE story integrating AI into the results from Google, which is also affecting the results and adding something else to position 0, making it harder for SEOs to only follow the ranking and the number of clicks.

Therefore, instead of worrying about the ranking, you should be guiding qualitative traffic to your clients.”

Why is Google Shopping becoming more important and what do SEOs need to do about it?

“Google Shopping is becoming more and more dominant in its domain. It’s becoming stronger, collecting all of the data, and comparing everything. Of course, that’s natural but it means that SEOs have to work harder to attract customers and be at the top of the search, attracting the right user who will buy from you.

For me, it’s a question of two things. First, you need to provide a really good offering so that you can be as attractive as possible to users. The other part of the story is building trust with your customers so that, when they see your results, they will want to buy that product from your website.

Now, more than ever, it’s a story of building trust so that users will see you, recognise you, and choose to buy from you. You can expand your keyword research (which remains fundamental to any SEO strategy) and integrate more terms that relate to that trust.

Show who you are and that you know what you’re doing, and show why your product is the best and they should buy it.”

There are many different brands and products out there, so how do you differentiate yourself?

“Here we come to the basics. As SEO experts, up until now, we have always focused on our KPIs: ranking, clicks, how many articles we publish, etc. It has always been said that the most difficult part of SEO is keyword research, and it’s even harder now.

You should try to answer your users’ questions and build a concrete connection with them. If you’re a business owner, you should not be afraid to show yourself in a video so that people will recognise you and link you to your products.

Try to add concrete signals in different locations. If you are in B2B, you should have a very good profile on LinkedIn. That will send signals, and users can check who you are and what your reputation is. If you are selling other products, you could be sending those signals on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.

In 2025, more than just being an expert in SEO, you need to be an expert in the social area around SEO and the social signals that come from these social networks.

We have seen the number of results that are appearing from Reddit and Quora, which shows that users are looking for information that comes from real people. With the augmentation of AI, people are much more in need of real, authentic information. Now, more than ever, the SEO strategy should include these social signals so that you don’t waste any opportunities to win.”

Is building a personal brand for the thought leaders within your organisation more important than the business brand?

“It’s a mixture of both. In marketing, we have learned that people buy from people. In the challenging world of today, personal branding is much more important than it was before.

We have too many brands and too many products. We have to focus on the value of the product that you’re offering, whatever that product may be, but also link that with your face or the face of the people in charge.

If you’re making content for a client who repairs things, instead of writing an article about what they do, go and ask them to make a 20-minute video talking about their work. That will send more important traffic to their work than focusing solely on the products and what they can offer alone.”

How important is something like conversion rate to SEO success?

“Conversion rate has been very important, and it will continue to be very important as well.

Many KPIs have lost some of their importance, but I am not saying that they have lost it definitively. I’m saying that we should not keep the focus on them in the same way that we did before.

Click-through rate has always been a very important signal, and it’s becoming even more so. You should focus on revenue and on targeting the correct clicks to your website. With click-through rate, people come, interact, and read what is on your website, and they will also order your products.

That’s a very important signal to Google and other search engines that your website is serving the user, and you should keep your position in the SERPs.”

Are you only looking at click-through rates from the SERPs or are you including click-through rates progressing through your website?

“It’s everywhere. In 2025, since everything is changing and we are no longer stable, the objective should be to create this from different channels.

In marketing, we say that you should always keep email marketing as your main channel because, whenever a social network disappears, you will always have your email marketing traffic. For me, it’s the same in SEO.

Always keep the traffic that’s coming from social networks to your posts and your products because that will lead people to your website as much as people coming from organic traffic.

Even if you focus on the social side, and being informative on Instagram and LinkedIn, make sure that the products are clarified on your website, so the purchase will happen there. If you focus on that, you will be a winner in 2025.”

Is mobile optimization important for every brand or do certain types of businesses need to focus more on it than others?

“I’m surprised that so many websites are still suffering from bad user experience on mobile, knowing that most of the revenue on the internet today is generated through mobile.

You should focus on mobile first because, for many years now, the first indexed version of your website is the mobile version. I’m surprised that many clients are still suffering from this issue.

Mobile is important for all types of products and services. Even if the users make the final decision on a laptop (if it’s something complicated like SaaS), their first impression or the beginning of their search journey usually happens on mobile.”

Trust is quite an intangible metric, so how do you measure the positive impact of trust and brand awareness?

“There are tools that specialise in this, like Hootsuite, that you can integrate into your strategy. You have listening tools where you can listen to what people are saying about your brand on Instagram or other social networks.

This is very important because your brand might be very famous on Instagram, but it’s only famous because people are searching for whether or not your brand is a scam.

You need to be attentive to everything that’s going on in those social spaces. Based on those conversations, you will know how to orient the information that’s on your social networks or your website, to clarify and show that you are unique.

There are also KPIs you can use to measure trust and measure your brand, but it’s a little bit outside of the SEO domain. That’s why I recommend educating yourself on the social domain or collaborating with partners who are really strong in that, so they can help you to have this social eye on your brand and your clients.”

There is a lot to be done, so how do you know what to prioritise?

“It depends on your brand, your client, the size of their work, and the budget behind all of that.

If you have to choose, you should give a little less attention to the classic KPIs that we have followed for all these years and add in some of these trust KPIs. You can increase that with time, when you have more budget and more opportunities.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Be specialised in your work and look for a good partner in the social area. Then, you can work together to create an offer for a client that can guarantee success.

If you’re independent, you want to collaborate with a social media professional to make sure that the content you create is optimized for that and published there, as a unified approach.

I don’t want you to finish the year with 2,000 clicks on the website, but not much revenue. Find a good collaboration and go with that.

Rana Abu Quba Chamsi is an SEO Consultant and Trainer, and you can find her over at Expando.Digital.