2025 in Digital

In a year marked by rapid advancements in both the capabilities and usage of artificial intelligence, our sector isn’t one for standing still.

Before we were asking if AI would impact our sector – now the question is to what extent.

But the developments weren’t just restricted to this emerging technology – we saw multiple significant Google Search updates, the protagonists of the advertising landscape shift, and more.

Every year we take a look at what we expect to see for the year ahead. And every year it changes enormously.

So what do our senior leaders see for 2025? In this piece, we’ll look at:

• Digital trends
• SEO trends
• PPC trends
• Web trends
• New business trends

So, let’s get started…

Digital Trends

In 2024, you couldn’t move for headlines about AI. Large corporates have scrambled to understand where and how it can add value. Prophesiers have had a field day. Thousands of start-ups have been spawned. We’ve even seen some huge brands start to create TV adverts with it.

It’s fair to say that it isn’t going anywhere and we are still in that explosive early phase where developments are happening at lightning speed and the ability of the technology is improving in leaps and bounds.

In 2025 I predict that AI usage will shift from generating (generally low-quality) content to integrating it into business workflows and making sense of data. AI Video creation will also be adopted at scale. Expect all of your favourite tools and platforms to double down on AI integration, adding AI features wherever they can.

In the world of search, 2025 is going to be the year of the brand. Recent changes to Google have favoured companies that have a real-world footprint that is broader than just an optimised website.

Showing that as a company you are more than just your product or service and being present across multiple channels and touchpoints will favour you in the eyes of Google. For us, that means educating our clients about how we can harness these other touchpoints and joining the dots across marketing channels.

SEO also is evolving into “search everywhere optimisation” – consumers are now finding information and answers through many different channels, from AI search through to TikTok, YouTube and image search. The most successful brands will be omni-channel and discoverable for more than just their product.

When marketers are being asked to do more for less, this can seem overwhelming. With all this noise, it still pays to remember that Google still enjoys circa 90% market share. We’re here to help our clients make sense of it all and focus on what matters – their own digital growth.

SEO Trends

During 2024 you could barely go five seconds without yet another ‘revolutionary’ Artificial Intelligence tool or ‘game-changing’ startup announcement.

But while most were short-lived, half-baked or beta-versions at best, there have been a few select tools and processes we’ve integrated into our workflow to save our SEO team time and add valuable insight into our campaigns (and we’re always on the lookout for more – subject to rigorous testing of course!). 

An important part of the AI adoption process has been to go behind the hype. Phrases like ‘powered by AI’ are so vague and common-place as to become meaningless. Consumers (including us as an agency and our client base) are becoming increasingly savvy to these marketing messages, so companies will have to go to greater lengths to show how AI can make a tangible difference in their products.

That said, studies estimate that over 8 billion devices now have some form of AI-enabled assistant – a figure which has nearly doubled in the past 18 months. It’s a development likely to reshape the marketing landscape over the next 12 months by opening the door to unparalleled levels of personalisation and curation.

In 2025, I think a big question our industry needs to ask is, ‘What is a modern SEO?’ It’s no longer enough just to be an expert on all things links, content and technical.

The modern SEO needs to understand the role that brand plays in the search landscape, be able to talk strategically to clients about where they sit in their industry versus competitors, identify and deliver on opportunities for sustained, long-term growth (not just highlight issues and fixes) and do more to understand their client’s audience behaviour and browsing habits. 

Ultimately, being a successful SEO in 2025 means being consultative and adaptive – having a strategic plan in place to paint a compelling comparative picture, gain buy-in and ensure you’re not working in a vacuum.

Your medium-to-long-term plan also needs to be flexible enough to respond to market changes, your client’s business objectives, seasonality, audience behaviour patterns, and of course, Google algorithm updates.

Simply relying on a rigid list of deliverables to plough through without ever stopping to analyse what’s effective and why will look severely limiting in comparison. 

Over the past few years I think Google has grown wise to us doing SEO for SEO’s sake, so it’s time to regroup, double-down and make sure your organic campaigns are fully integrated into a client’s marketing mix and effectively targeting legitimate audience segments rather than algorithms.

PPC Trends

As predicted, PPC saw a huge surge in AI and automation during 2024 – with smarter campaign optimisation, ad creative generation, and advancement in real-time bidding.  AI models became more advanced this year and more integrated into paid media advertising platforms. 

2025 will see a continued advancement in AI and automation, focusing on driving efficiency, personalisation and performance across all paid media platforms. By delivering deeper insights into data and trends, AI will help ensure ads are delivered to the most relevant audience and are made more personalised for the user.

2024 also saw further growth in video search ad formats and connected TV advertising, with platforms such as Prime, Netflix and Disney+ increasing their advertising efforts. 

With the growth of streaming services, this is expected to continue to grow throughout 2025, with advertisers starting to prioritise these streaming platforms within their marketing strategy. These platforms are also likely to enhance their ad offerings, to include interactive and shoppable ads in the next few years. 

Most surprisingly, 2024 saw Google’s decision to abandon or perhaps delay their third-party cookie removal plans, stating they were not in the best position to manage the removal. Instead, they will roll out a one-time cookie prompt to users, allowing users to set their own cookie preferences. But there is still talk that Google will phase out third-party cookies in Chrome by the end of 2025, so watch this space…

I think voice and visual search ads will see increased growth during 2025, changing how brands connect with their audiences, and enhancing the overall customer experience. Voice search ads will benefit from AI-driven virtual assistants like Alexa and Google and offer more conversational ad formats. These ads will allow customers to discover and purchase products hands-free with only voice commands, more and more.

Visual search Ads will see a similar growth, driven again by advancements in AI. This technology will allow consumers to search for products by simply taking a photo – creating an effortless journey from discovery to purchase. Advertisers utilising this technology in their marketing strategy will be able to better understand their customers’ intent and purchase journey.

Video ads and interactive ad formats will advance during 2025 too, with platforms YouTube and TikTok enhancing their shoppable video ad features – allowing users to purchase directly from the ad experience. These innovative formats will become essential for brands to connect with their customers and drive sales in the future.

Web Trends

Overall, the word on the street is that AI has become an indispensable tool for web developers in 2024, enabling them to create more efficient, user-friendly, and secure websites. I can’t wait to see some of the groundbreaking systems that many promise – whether these come to fruition in 2025 remains to be seen.

Last year‘s web review mentioned how we could expect to see advancements in AI and machine learning and I got excited at the potential impact this could have on the web landscape and within the industry in general.

My expectations may have been a little overzealous, but overall the prospect of a revolution in the way we develop and interact with sites remains true, and 2024 feels like we’re now well and truly down the path. Although we might not quite have the tangible increases in efficiency and productivity we were hoping for, there is still a palpable sense that AI can and will start to be used effectively in 2025.

This can only happen once we see more prominent deployment of AI-powered systems embedded in our processes, and the ‘battle for supremacy’ between the various platforms settles a little.

Aside from that, it’s been ‘business as usual’ in web development. We continue to show commitment to learning, adaptation, and perseverance in the evolving tech landscape,  something that’s essential in order to stay relevant and ensure our work is still valued by businesses.

According to Stack Overflow’s recent developer survey, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and Python continue to be the most popular programming languages in 2024 with Python emerging as the most desired for future use, and this is no doubt due to its simplicity and versatility.

Efficiency and productivity seem to be more critical than ever and we continue to face challenges, particularly with technical debt and market shifts, but I’m optimistic about the future, especially regarding AI’s potential to improve workflows. Developer consensus online is that AI tools will complement, not replace, us developers and many expect to shift from writing code to reviewing AI-generated code in the future.

Despite the recent spat between web heavyweights WordPress and WP Engine, with WordPress throwing its proverbial toys out the pram and taking control of the hugely popular Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin, 2024 has been a significant year for WordPress with several major updates and improvements. This has included further enhancements to WP’s editor user experience with Gutenberg continuing to become ever more intuitive and powerful.

Real-time collaboration, enhanced styling capabilities and improved search and command prompt functionality have all added to its useability. Various performance improvements have also been made to reduce loading times and enhance overall website speed, which as we know, is crucial these days.

Overall, WordPress has continued to evolve in 2024, offering a more powerful, user-friendly, and secure platform for building websites and web applications, which as WordPress specialists ourselves, is something we’re very excited about. However, with the advent of AI-enhanced development, we should all remember what open source means. 

As WordPress CEO and co-founder Matt Mullenweg points out, stop calling things open source when they’re clearly not (he’s calling out Meta’s supposedly free-to-use AI platform here)

So we look to 2025. For fear of repeating the ‘things to expect’ from previous reviews in this article, it is, in effect, more of the same, just with enhancement from AI. There is always going to be a continued focus on user experience and increased efficiency and automation, but I hope AI can help by offering more than just code generation or personalised content.

I’m itching to start seeing how AI can influence design and accessibility, enhanced security and, possibly the golden ticket; improved efficiency. The real uptake will occur when we finally see a faster turnaround with accelerated development, where AI tools streamline development with reduced manual effort, automating those repetitive tasks, and freeing us up to focus on more complex and creative aspects of a project (the bits we really enjoy!). Ultimately this should lead to better quality across the board.

New Business Trends

2024 has certainly been a year of numerous learnings and business development oscillations, with the months of late Spring and early Summer providing a real challenge in terms of conversion rate and deals secured.

For the past 4-5 years, we’ve boasted a really strong and consistent pitch-to-deal ratio, but I’d describe these particular months as providing a real boomerang of performance!

We’ve had no shortage of demand, and if anything our inbound lead numbers have far excelled 2023, but the sales cycle has lengthened, and the number pulling the trigger on their new digital search campaigns has certainly decreased, perhaps due to the confusion AI’s prominence and varying products has meant for us all.

But late summer saw that boomerang effect and we’ve returned, thankfully, to nearly the same figures we attained prior, so confidence in the market has obviously been affected by perhaps the election and other macroeconomic factors. But thankfully, and very positively, there remains no shortage in demand for our services and a trusted provider.

We’ve secured a number of exciting new projects and clients this year across many different sectors, and have focussed on the importance of retaining more existing clients. We’ve also continued on from 2023 with many businesses showing a real appetite for new SEO focussed websites (utilising our unique ‘SEO Phase Zero’ approach to design and development) for their company’s offering.

2024 has again allowed us to welcome back a far higher number of in-person pitches and business discussions this year, something that really started to gain momentum again in 2023 after COVID restrictions were lifted and life got back to normal.

We’ve always been a visible and transparent agency and continue to encourage an in-person meeting, and we’ve welcomed so many more prospective clients to our gorgeous headquarters in Sheffield to pitch our solutions and to meet a mixture of our department heads and campaign account managers. 

Our ongoing advice to businesses looking to take their first steps into digital marketing, and especially SEO, is to always remain patient and to keep the faith in the process. Don’t forget, SEO is a medium to long-term marketing investment and can take time to provide a return on the investment.

So don’t simply knee-jerk and pull the plug in the first couple of months when results are highly unlikely to come your way, as the medium to long-term benefits of a well-executed SEO campaign will pay incredible dividends, if you give it the fullest opportunity.

So what will 2025 bring us for new business and further opportunities for growth? I feel most agencies will really have to work hard to secure new business, showing how they’re going to have to fully demonstrate ROI and true value, and work even harder to retain their clients, with more competition in the digital agency market often offering dangerously favourable (and unsustainable?!) terms to entice new clients through the door.

We’re all hugely looking forward to seeing what 2025 will bring and we all couldn’t be more up for the challenge.

It’s Time to Get Ahead

As this article shows, there’s a lot to think about in the coming year…

But our experts are here to help make sure you’re not just aware of the developments, but getting ahead of them.

Whether it’s our SEO, PPC or Web team, they’re among the best in the business – receiving international awards and working with household brands. All to help businesses get more customers online, in the ever-changing world of digital marketing.

With the right assistance, these changes can be seen as exciting. But without it, you can get left behind.

Get in touch with our team today, and get ahead of 2025.