It’s no surprise that large language models (LLMs) such as Perplexity and ChatGPT are disrupting the search engine industry. While there is endless debate as to whether search has been monopolized by Google or if that dynamic is shifting, the changes that are of interest to us at Riviea rest with user behaviors, not which platforms are “en vogue.” This is because any good SEO strategy aims to improve a website’s usefulness for consumers first and foremost, leaving platform-specific considerations as a secondary focus. This is simply to say that consumer behavior drives the underlying mechanisms for crawling, indexing, and ranking content.

As we look ahead to 2025, a year full of uncertainties, there are a number of SEO factors that are believed to remain relevant to any audit work you may have planned. Let’s dive into those factors:

Content Helpfulness & Buyer Journey Alignment

Search engines, along with LLMs, have been known to prioritize content that provides walkthrough explanations to user queries. As search behavior shifts from keyword-based queries to natural language- or question-based queries, the best-performing content is that which is able to guide someone from the awareness buying journey stage to the point at which they can reliably choose a solution (i.e., the decision stage).

Thinking about the buying journey in three steps – awareness, consideration, and decision – is useful in an audit. When auditing content, you should first evaluate its ability to describe why someone is experiencing a problem or needs a solution (awareness stage). Next, you should assess its description of the available solutions (consideration stage). Finally, content should also be evaluated for how effectively it recommends a solution AND proves that solution is the best one (decision stage). A buyer journey-based assessment conducted in relation to specific queries will reveal gaps in the content strategy as well as opportunities for improvement.

Site Architecture & Content Relationships

Users and search engines alike benefit from a well-organized website. Both should be able to easily and logically navigate a site and understand the relationships between pages beyond their crosslinks. During an audit, the hierarchical arrangement of pages should be assessed to see if broad topics offer paths to go deeper into subtopics and eventually take action (e.g., purchase or convert). Related pages should naturally interlink, but they should also share similar URL structures, tags, and layouts. Remember that the similarity between pages can be demonstrated by more than just text on a page. Visual and technical cues should be utilized to signal relationships as well.

Speed

Website speed remains a critical factor due to its significant impact on user experience. Speed should be assessed on a page-by-page basis, with average page load time being an adequate metric for site health. Additionally, server response times should be examined in the event that hosting-driven issues exist. Tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights will help identify areas for improvement like image file size and code bloat, should those be issues with your site.

Visual Stability

The Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) metric represents the visual stability of a webpage, quantifying how often users experience unexpected layout shifts (elements on a page move on screen as more of the page loads). Content that is dynamically injected (e.g., interstitial banners or custom font families) are often culprits for layout shifts. Layout shifts tend to lead to accidental clicks or lost reading position, so reducing them has a positive effect on user experience. Moreover, a good CLS score contributes to better search rankings and LLM performance.

Originality

There’s an obvious temptation to use LLMs to produce website content. Although they do have a role to play, the E-E-A-T framework Google uses to guide site owners about what constitutes search-friendly content clearly prioritizes first-hand experience as a hallmark for good content. This means that content should reflect the real-world experience of the writer. These lived experiences are impossible for LLMs to have (although they can lie about having them). If you realize that your content lacks this kind of originality, storytelling can be a great tool for injecting an adequate level of real-world experience. Testimonials and case studies are common and popular formats as well.

Prevalence of Errors

Identifying and addressing errors is a critical component of ongoing SEO and site management. You should regularly scan your website for broken links, 4XX-level errors, incorrect redirects, and other issues. While we prefer to use Ahrefs for these monitoring processes, Google Search Console, SEMRush, and others offer similar insights. Websites with fewer errors are looked at more favorably by users and search engines alike and are crawled and ranked accordingly.

Current Performance for Benchmarking

Gathering a comprehensive, data-centered view of your website prior to your audit is important. This view serves as a jump-off point (JOP) and enables you to gauge the impact of your optimization efforts following the audit. Usage metrics like engaged sessions, events, and conversions are critical in understanding the usefulness of your site to searchers. Metrics like click-through rate, average position, and number of ranked keywords help gauge the visibility and attractiveness of your site when users encounter it in search engines and LLMs. On top of understanding how your website currently performs, metrics which represent poor performance against industry benchmarks can be used to help identify weaknesses and set improvement priorities. Capturing the current state of these metrics ultimately enables effective comparison in the future to keep you on track with your SEO goals.

Closing Thoughts

Obviously, there’s a lot that goes into an SEO audit. While this list isn’t intended to be comprehensive, we hope you’ve found some useful factors to consider as you work through your optimization efforts in 2025. Considering things like your content’s helpfulness and alignment with a buyer journey, along with UX elements like speed and stability, will help ensure your SEO strategy remains holistic and relevant to search engine and LLM users alike.

Still want guidance on your SEO audit? We’re here to help, use our contact page to get in touch with us today!