What’s new

• AI-Powered Marketing & Personalisation: AI is now part of the backbone of modern marketing - from personalising user experiences to automating ad campaigns. AI tools enable predictive analytics, helping marketers understand user behaviour, segment audiences, and craft content or ads tailored to individual preferences. Search engines themselves are also changing. Rather than simply listing web pages, AI-powered search engines and platforms now deliver direct answers or summarized content based on generative AI.

• Voice, Visual & Multimodal Search: More users are searching by speaking (via voice assistants) or via images/visual search tools. As smart speakers and devices proliferate, voice-search and conversational queries become more common. At the same time, image search and other non-traditional search formats are gaining traction.  

• Video-First and Short-Form Content: Video - especially short-form video content on mobile - has exploded. Platforms like TikTok, Reels, Shorts, live streams, and similar video formats are now dominant online. This shift influences not only social channels but also how content is discovered through search and ads.  

• Integrating SEO & Ads - Blurred Boundaries: With changing search behaviours, the line between organic search (SEO) and paid advertising (PPC) is blurring. Users may discover products via social commerce or video, then turn to search engines to compare or evaluate - meaning a holistic strategy needs to account for both discovery and conversion.  

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How to Use These Trends to Shape SEO & PPC Strategy

Given these shifts, here’s how Ascend can help your business harness these trends to build a more effective SEO and PPC strategy to drive real growth in 2025 and beyond.  

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1. Adopt AI tools —while keeping your human touch

Use AI for data analysis, predictive insights, automating ad placements, or even writing first draft content. This can save time and improve targeting. For PPC campaigns, AI-powered bidding strategies and ad-copy generation are increasingly reliable.  

At the same time, maintain human oversight: authenticity, expert insights, and brand voice still matter - and will increasingly be what differentiates brands from purely AI-generated content.  

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2. Optimise for voice, visual, and multimodal search

Adapt your content planning: think conversationally. Instead of just targeting short keywords, build content around longer, natural-language phrases and questions (e.g. “how to choose noise-cancelling headphones for air travel”). This helps you capture voice-search traffic.

Also, invest in high-quality visual content - images, infographics, and even videos - properly tagged with metadata and alt text to help with visual search and AI indexing. Multimodal optimisation will become a differentiator.  

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3. Make video a core part of your strategy

Create short-form video content that’s mobile-friendly, engaging, and optimised with titles & descriptions containing relevant keywords. Videos not only perform well on social platforms but can also appear in search results. That means video can be a bridge between discovery (awareness) and consideration (research). Video-based ads and livestream-shopping (for ecommerce) can deliver strong ROI, especially when combined with retargeting and dynamic ad formats.  

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4. Prepare for AI-powered search & GEO

Don’t just optimise for traditional search engines - start thinking about AI-driven answer engines. Use schema markup, FAQs, rich snippets, bulleted lists — make your content easily “machine readable.” That way, you're more likely to be surfaced when an AI tool or chatbot generates an answer for a user.  

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5. Use a unified and omnichannel approach

Audiences are increasingly moving across platforms (social, video, search, voice, apps), your strategy should reflect that. That means cohesive messaging, retargeting across channels, and aligning organic and paid efforts so they feed into one another.

This integrated approach ensures you meet customers wherever they are - and influence their journey from discovery to conversion.

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Final thoughts

In 2025, rapid changes in AI, search behaviour, and content consumption are reshaping how businesses need to approach digital marketing. Ascend can help embrace these trends with a unified, data-driven strategy, to help your brand stay visible, competitive, and positioned for sustainable growth.

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