How to Improve Website SEO for Organic and AI Search

SEO is evolving fast. Many things that used to work before no longer make an impact.

And yet, I’d argue that the more things change, the more they stay the same in the world of SEO.

For one, organic is still the top source of traffic for Exploding Topics.

If you’re committed to improving your website SEO, you can also achieve the same growth.

Let’s break down a general strategy for website SEO that broadly applies to most businesses in 2025.

1. Measure Your SEO Starting Point

Measuring progress is an absolute must for SEO growth. You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Start by recording a snapshot showing where you stand today. Here are some key metrics you should pay attention to:

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors who find your website through search engines like Google. Monitoring organic traffic is essential because it helps you measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
How many visitors are landing on your site from Google each month? There are a few ways to measure your organic traffic. And they’re all very easy.

You can log into your Google Search Console, select “Search Results” under the “Performance” section of the navigation to find your total clicks in the last 3 months:

Alternatively, you can also use Sessions in GA4 as a measure of your current organic traffic.

Open your GA4 dashboard and select “Reports” from the sidebar. Find the “Traffic acquisition” report and click on it. Then, note the number of sessions next to the Organic Search row.

It’s up to you which metric you use, as long as it makes sense for organic traffic. What matters is to monitor your progress using the same metric over time.

How long does it take to see results from SEO improvements?

You’ll likely see some SEO improvements within 3-6 months of implementing the suggestions in this article. Significant ranking changes for competitive keywords usually take 6-12 months.

Keyword Rankings

Tracking your keyword rankings will give you the most direct insights into your SEO progress.

The easiest way to measure keyword rankings is by using Semrush.

In the Semrush Organic Research tool, enter your domain name, select a region, and press “Search”.

On the Overview page of the report, select “Keywords”. Semrush will then display a bar chart showing your ranking distribution trend over time.

If you hover your cursor over the chart, it will give you a breakdown of your ranking keywords by position.

This is all the information you’ll need to monitor your keyword ranking growth month over month.

What are the most important SEO metrics?

Traffic and keywords are vital to track for SEO improvements. But I also recommend paying attention to a few additional metrics that influence your SEO performance:

• Click-through rate (CTR): Use Google Search Console to check your overall CTR. You can also filter CTR by specific pages for a granular view when you’re optimizing your most important content.
• Engagement rate and Avg. session duration: User experience is important for SEO. Use GA4 to monitor engagement rate and avg. session duration for your organic channel to determine if you need to improve your UX.
• Backlink profile: Quality backlinks correlate with top-performing domains on search. Use Semrush Backlink Analytics to measure your backlink profile against your main competitors.

2. Revive Rankings for High-Potential Keywords

Keywords that are already ranking well, but don’t have the top spots yet are your ideal low-hanging opportunities for SEO improvements.

To grow organic traffic, you need people to click on your result when they do a Google search.

And for them to click your result, it first needs to show up in prominent places on the SERP.

According to a Backlinko study, click-through rate for results on Google’s first page drops below 4% for queries ranked 7 or lower.

But if you can boost your bottom-of-the-page results to the top 3 or even top 5, the CTR improvement would be enormous.

Your best candidates for keywords that can grab top spots are the keywords already ranking on page 1.

One effective approach is to find all keywords ranked at the bottom of page 1 or on page 2. Then, optimize and update your content to get a boost in rankings near the top.

You can find these keywords easily using Semrush. Enter your domain in the Organic Research tool. Once the results have loaded, go to the “Positions” tab.

Use the “Positions” filter to enter a customer range for keyword rankings or select from the listed preset ranges.

Google already likes your content for these keywords enough to rank you in the top 10 or top 20. So these keywords have the best potential for ranking higher.

These easy on-page SEO improvements should be your top priority.

3. Optimize for CTR

An optimal click-through is the most effective way to squeeze out the full traffic potential of your best ranking keywords.

To a great extent, the CTR your page draws from Google search depends on its ranking.

The second-biggest factor is your page title and meta description. If your page title fails to attract clicks, you won't be able to convert your rankings into actual traffic.

Eventually, Google will drop your rankings too if people aren’t clicking you despite holding high positions.

The most important factor in creating an appealing title is ensuring relevance. That means including the primary keyword a user is searching for prominently, but naturally.

When the keyword appears in the title, it’s a clear sign to the reader that your article has high relevance to their query.

The problem is, content optimized for popular searches is already saturated. And every website knows they need to incorporate the keyword in the title, which leads to every web result looking similar.

That’s why great SEO copywriters go one step further than simple keyword usage: they add a unique angle, often with an emotional appeal.

In my experience, page titles that draw good CTRs have these common qualities:

• Relevance: Keywords appear prominently in the title
• Search intent match: Content type matches the user's intent (e.g., "guide," "review," "checklist")
• Unique angle: Differentiate from the competition with an angle qualifying the keyword
• Emotion/Trigger Words: Evoke curiosity, urgency, excitement, or other strong emotions
• Numbers: Use meaningful statistics to stand out in SERP
• Freshness: When appropriate, mention the year (or even month) in the title

In addition to the title, rich snippets also play a role in pulling clicks to your site.

Rich snippets appear in search results and show additional information. This could include pricing or ratings for a product.

For example, star ratings for review posts appearing under your title and meta description naturally draw more attention than a plain blue link result.

You can get these rich snippets by implementing structured data (also called schema markup).

4. Grab SERP Features

Google search continually evolves, introducing new SERP features that highlight your content, products, and services directly in search results.

Some of the prominent SERP features are:

• Featured Snippets
• AI Overviews
• People Also Ask
• Sitelinks
• Video Carousels
• Image Packs
• Popular Products

Here’s an example of an AI Overview:

Get picked up by one of these features, and it can pay off with higher visibility, and often, traffic.

The catch is that different keywords trigger different kinds of SERP features.

To optimize effectively, you first need to identify which keywords trigger a specific SERP feature in question (like Featured Snippets or AI Overviews).

Once again, you can use the Semrush Organic Research tool and enter your domain name. Then, navigate to the “Positions” tab.

Now, select the “SERP Features” filter and hover your cursor over “Domain doesn’t rank”. Pick one of the features to find missing opportunities, such as “featured snippet”.

Now, you’ll see all the keywords where a featured snippet exists but doesn’t belong to you.

You can refine your data further by ONLY looking at missing featured snippet opportunities for keywords where you’re ALSO ranking in the top 10, excluding all the lower-ranked keywords.

Just set the “Positions” filter to “Top 10” to find this data.

Google typically selects featured snippets and other SERP features from the top-ranking results.

So the smart approach is to prioritize these keywords when optimizing for SERP feature opportunities.

You can repeat this process for other important SERP features like AI Overviews, video carousels, and People Also Ask by selecting them from the filter, as I’ve shown in this example.

5. Match Format to Search Intent

Google has one goal: serving content that satisfies a user’s needs.

The only way you can do that is by creating content with full awareness of what a searcher is seeking when they type in a keyword on Google.

That means answering their questions accurately. And equally importantly, it also means using the right content format.

For example, consider a person searching “bmi calculator” on Google.

All the top-ranking results are actual calculators that give you a BMI score in real-time.

This shows the ideal format for this query is an actual calculator, not definitions or informational content

If you overlooked user intent, you might have created a blog post explaining BMI instead of providing the calculator people actually want.

That's a big reason many websites struggle to rank: they misunderstand user intent.

I strongly recommend checking the SERP results for your keyword to clearly understand user intent and improve your SEO.

Then, align your content format with what's already ranking because Google wouldn't reward those pages if they didn't match search intent.

6. Enhance Topic Coverage

To dominate the search results and win at SEO, you need comprehensive topic coverage.

The more deeply you discuss related subtopics and searcher questions, the more “complete” your content will appear to Google.

Answer Real User Questions

Google itself is a good source of information about what kind of specific questions people need answers to.

Google’s autocomplete suggestions and People Also Ask boxes are two important places where you can gather these insights.

For example, try entering an incomplete query into Google. Usually, Google will try to predict your full question with a list of autocomplete suggestions:

Many of these questions are complex enough to become detailed topic pages of their own.

Another way you can find topics and questions your audience cares about is to look at the People Also Ask Box on the SERP.

This can point you to topics of interest that can add depth to your content and increase your ability to satisfy user intent from all angles.

You can use tools like AlsoAsked.com and AnswerThePublic.com to uncover these questions from Google more easily.

Topic Clustering

When you’ve gathered multiple related topic ideas around a central theme, grouping them together around a central “pillar” page is a powerful strategy.

This is called topic clustering: related content pieces sit around a central theme to build authority.

The pillar page is your hub, and it interlinks with other pages that expand on specific aspects of the main topic.

The idea is to broadly cover a topic on the main page. Then, you can create separate pages for each subtopic where you elaborate on it in greater detail.

The resulting semantic depth of your content helps you build topical authority. In an era where earning consumer trust is tougher than ever, you need these authority signals to win and retain customers.

Besides, AI search engines prefer citing content displaying topical authority.

So it’s a vital consideration if you want to improve your website SEO for modern search.

You can also use ChatGPT for grouping your related topics if you want to speed up this process.

7. Target Untapped Keywords

Your first priority should be improving existing keywords with the potential to perform even better with a bit more effort.

But you also need to be on the lookout for new keywords that can give your site a massive uplift if you target them before they’ve become too mainstream.

One easy way you can find these trending topics is by using the Exploding Topics app. The “Trends Database” contains dozens of categories with data about related trends.

You can select a category that best matches your website niche to discover what’s trending.

Immediately, “airplane foot hammock” stands out as a great topic that’s growing in popularity and which isn’t yet saturated by content.

You can always pair these insights from Exploding Topics with the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool to discover the ideal keyword to target.

Keywords with lower difficulty give you the best chance of ranking well and gaining visibility on classic Google as well as in AI mode.

How many keywords should I target per page?

On each page, focus on 1-2 primary keywords. Add 3-5 closely related secondary keywords to expand your coverage of the topic. You can continue to adjust and improve your content when you update it.

8. Readability, Engagement, and UX

User engagement is an important factor that Google uses to interpret the quality of a page and determine rankings.

SEO experts have always stressed that user engagement is a ranking signal for SEO.

Google’s leaked algorithm document last year confirmed these theories by clearly referencing metrics like “good clicks” and “bad clicks”.

I recommend checking two GA4 metrics to get a sense of how engaging your content is:

• Engagement rate (or bounce rate, which is the mathematical inverse)
• Average session duration

Use the “Pages and screens” report in GA4 and take a note of the session duration and bounce rate of your top-performing pages.

Study your content with good engagement metrics to understand what makes it stand out. Apply the same ideas to underperforming content to give it a better chance of supporting user engagement.

Here are a few ways to improve your website’s engagement for SEO:

• Short paragraphs: Break up your text every 2-3 lines, dedicating each paragraph to a single idea only. Sometimes, you can split a single idea into multiple lines to add more breathing space.
• Structured sections: Well-structured content is more scannable for human readers, classic search engines, and AI crawlers.
• Visual content: Visuals add variety to your content, spaces out surrounding text evenly, and holds a viewer’s attention so they dwell longer on your page.
• Short summaries: Highlight the important bits of your content in a prominent summary section near the top of your page. Good summaries will entice readers to continue reading more and engage.
• Table of contents: Improving page navigation with jump links helps provide a better user experience. It also encourages readers to jump to deeper sections of your page, improving scroll depth and clicks representing good engagement.
• Interactive elements: Provide tools, calculators, and other elements users can interact with directly on your page if it aligns with the user intent. It’s an effective way to boost engagement and session duration signals.
• Data tables: Summarize complex information about a range of concepts using tables to help people understand comparisons, similarities, and relationships between ideas. Tables can improve engaged sessions and reduce bounces.

9. Demonstrate E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T is Google’s measure of content quality based on the writer's Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. It’s a mark of all content that Google considers “helpful”.

The idea is simple: Google wants real experts producing content relevant to their areas of expertise. It’s easy to demonstrate your expertise if you’re qualified to talk about a topic.

Here’s how you can add strong E-E-A-T signals to your content:

• Showcase real-world experience: Include personal anecdotes, case studies, or usage data that proves hands-on knowledge.
• Use bylines and bios: Add a clear author name with a bio that explains why they’re qualified to write on the topic. Mention certifications or years of experience directly relevant to the topic.
• Authoritative citations: Reference reputable sources, media features, or peer-reviewed citations where relevant.

10. Add Information Gain

Information gain is the unique value and insights your content provides, beyond the existing pages on the SERPs.

In modern SEO, your chances of succeeding are close to zero if your content is simply repeating the same information as others.

Focusing on E-E-A-T will naturally help you inject information gain.

That’s because content that features the expertise and experience of the writer will naturally lead to new and original insights. So it’s less likely to be copied from elsewhere.

This guide walks through strategies for crafting differentiated content, with real examples of information-dense content that stands out in AI-driven SERPs.

11. Prioritize Contextual Internal Links

Links placed naturally within the content body carry the most SEO weight.

For example, if you mention “on-page SEO techniques” in a blog post, you should link it to a guide on that exact topic.

This not only helps Google understand that the linked page is relevant to that anchor phrase, but also improves your topical depth across the site.

It’s also important to use descriptive anchor text. Avoid generic phrases like “click here” or “read more”.

Instead, describe what the linked page is about. In fact, the text surrounding the anchor text is also an ignored but important part of creating links that carry the most weight.

Cyrus Shepard recently called attention to this fact on LinkedIn:

“Instead of looking only at anchor text, Google also looks at the words *around* the link, looking for the rarest/uncommon words. If the nearby words are relevant to the page topic you’re linking to, Google can count that link as stronger.

• Rare + Topical words ≈ bigger vote

• Generic or off-topic fluff ≈ smaller vote

• Boilerplate (nav, footers, sidebars) keep repeating the same “context,” so their votes get heavily discounted”

12. Crawlability and Indexing

All search engines rely on accessible and open crawl paths to discover your pages across the web.

That’s true for Google as well as all newer AI search engines, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.

Here are a few important steps to ensure your site is set up properly for all crawlers and free from indexing errors:

• Allow Google, Bing, and AI search engines in your robots.txt file (e.g., User-agent: ChatGPT-User, User-agent: PerplexityBot).
• Minimize JavaScript in your main content body (use plain HTML where possible)
• Optimize your crawl budget by fixing indexing errors (Use Google Search Console’s “Indexing” report” to identify these errors).

The Semrush Site Audit tool includes a helpful crawlability report. Use it to identify your indexability along with a breakdown of how your crawl budget might be getting wasted.

13. Page Speed and Mobile Friendliness

Page speed and mobile responsiveness have long been official Google ranking factors. But their importance will rise even more as search evolves to include LLMs and AI agents.

With Google’s AI Mode and ChatGPT, Agentic AI systems are already beginning to interact with the web on behalf of users.

These systems prefer lightweight, fast-loading, and semantically structured pages to extract information efficiently.

You can use Google’s Page Speed Insights to identify your site's performance across mobile and desktop. The tool also offers suggestions for fixing performance issues.

14. Build Domain Authority

Google uses domain authority to evaluate the quality of a domain or an individual page (page authority). Semrush did a study that found a clear correlation between rankings and domain authority score.

Authority score (AS) measures a website's overall quality and influence in search results.

The most impactful way to improve your domain authority is by building quality backlinks.

You need to make sure your authority score is within the range of your competitors.

Higher AS is better. But too low compared to competitors, and this could give you ranking problems both in traditional search and AI search.

The Semrush Backlink Gap tool is great for discovering link opportunities you’re missing. Enter your domain in the first row and add up to 4 competitors in the fields beneath.

After you hit “Find prospects”, you’ll find backlinks you don’t have yet but your competitors do.

Since they already linked to your competitor, there’s a good chance they’ll be interested in linking to a website producing content in a similar niche.

So you can go ahead and find your best articles and start your link building process for them.

15. Brand Mentions and PR

In an era of AI-led search, brand mentions will be just as important as backlinks in improving your website's SEO rankings.

The good thing is that brand mentions are often easier to acquire than winning backlinks. That’s because a mention doesn’t necessarily have to be linked (although a branded link is even better).

You can get brand mentions by:

• Contributing answers and quotes: Use platforms like Help a B2B Writer and Featured.com to find relevant requests for quotes from other writers and submit yours. If picked by a writer, you’ll get an attribution with your website name and byline, with the possibility of a free link as well.
• Convert reviews to testimonials: If you’ve reviewed any product or service, the brand might want to feature your positive review as a testimonial with a mention of your website. You can also reach out to brands you’ve reviewed with a request to have your review taken as a testimonial on their site.
• Get featured in roundup posts: As your brand exposure grows, other websites will naturally want to feature you in relevant roundup articles, creating a snowball effect of increasing brand mentions on the web.

It’s important to be methodical about your branding and monitor your progress. The best way is to use a brand monitoring tool so you can keep tabs on how your brand mentions (linked or unlinked) are growing over time.

The Semrush Brand Monitoring app is perfect for tracking branded terms and mentions across the web.

What I love about this tool is that it’s not limited to just counting brand mentions. It also analyzes sentiments around your brand mentions.

That’s an important piece of intel that can help you understand how people really feel about you. You can then build an informed strategy about proper positioning and shaping perceptions in your favor.

The future of SEO is likely to be highly brand-driven. Make sure your overall SEO strategy includes brand-building as an important component of your improvement plan.

16. Local SEO and GBP

Local SEO ensures that your business appears in search results when people nearby are searching for services or products you offer.

The most powerful tool you can use to win at local SEO is your Google Business Profile (GBP).

If your GBP is not fully optimized, you’re losing opportunities to build trust, enhance visibility, and influence brand perception.

And all of these are important website SEO factors in 2025 and beyond.

Here’s what you should focus on:

• Claim and verify your listing: If you haven’t claimed your GBP yet, do that first.
• Provide complete and accurate info: Fill out your business hours, contact info, website URL, and business description. Also use your real business name without any keyword stuffing. These are all key trust signals.
• Add all relevant categories: Your primary category should match your core offering (e.g., “Dog Groomer” or “Personal Injury Lawyer”), but you can also add secondary categories to cover other services in Google’s Knowledge Graph.
• Add photos: Use real images accurately representing your business. Avoid stock images or media that could be misleading.

Start High-Impact Improvements to Your Site SEO

Improving your website’s SEO is a multi-faceted process.

You can’t single out a few areas of your site to improve and expect a massive impact.

Instead, try to be strategic about it and have a plan that involves all 3 areas of SEO: on-page, off-page, and technical.

Start by tracking your progress with the right tools like GA4 and GSC. And for your long-term strategy, sign up to Semrush to analyze your rankings, discover keyword gaps, monitor backlinks, and uncover new opportunities, all in one place.