Why Your Business Needs an SEO Agency in 2025

This is an entry-level article designed for business owners and marketers who are new to SEO. It explains why SEO remains essential, even as the search engine optimization landscape continues to evolve.

According to BrightEdge, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine in 2025, highlighting just how vital search visibility is to your business success.

With such a significant portion of your potential customers starting their journey on search engines like Google, ensuring your website ranks highly isn’t merely beneficial — it’s essential. This is why SEO has enjoyed its prominence as a major digital marketing channel.

But as SEO grew, so did the competition within it. Getting visibility on Google has become increasingly challenging. We are currently going through a significant change due to new Google features and shifting search behavior. Google is making profound changes to its search engine result pages (SERPs). Let’s break it down.

The New Search Reality: Answers > Clicks

In today’s attention economy, impressions from Google do not result in the same number of clicks we used to receive. This is because, in recent years, Google has shifted its focus from driving traffic to websites to becoming an answer engine of sorts. (Google does say the traffic they do send, although less, is more ready to convert thanks to these changes in their SERPs.)

But what are these changes?

By now, you’ve surely seen rich answers, AI Overviews, and AI Mode products pulling your attention away from the traditional blue links. We are seeing them most often for your top-of-funnel searches. A top-of-funnel search refers to queries made by users who are at the beginning of their buying journey. These searchers typically aren’t ready to make a purchase yet. Instead, they’re looking for general information, advice, or solutions to a problem.

Here is an example of an AI Overview (AIO) that is using TOF content from a Greenlane blog post (screenshot below).

On the left is the answer Google generated for the query “what is user intent in SEO”. This answer was generated with our content.

On the right is a citation linking to our original article. However, the SEO industry is noticing that few users click on these citations. Instead, searchers are typically satisfied by reading the AI-generated answers directly, which unfortunately comes at the expense of the websites that provided the original information.

This is the new reality at Google. It is forcing SEO to be more about driving visibility than measurable clicks. Many SEOs and businesses are unhappy with this change, but Google is all in with their new search engine.

Despite the change, there is still plenty of organic search opportunity in the world of SEO. Google has not abolished blue links. They are still showing plenty for lower funnel searchers.

How Google Determines Rankings

Google uses complex algorithms and systems to determine how websites rank in search results. These algorithms evaluate hundreds of factors, including content relevance, quality, user experience, technical optimizations, and the domain’s topic authority. Increasingly, Google also considers user engagement signals such as click-through rates and dwell time. Understanding how Google assesses these factors can significantly enhance your website’s visibility and ultimately drive more valuable organic traffic to your business.

Crawling is the first step in Google’s process, where automated bots, known as spiders, visit and scan web pages by following links. Crawling is like Google sending scouts (bots) out to explore a vast city, going street by street, and noting every store, sign, and billboard they encounter.

Next is indexing, where Google organizes and stores information from crawled pages in a massive database. This database acts like a giant digital library, ready to be searched when someone types in a query. Indexing is Google taking all those notes and organizing them neatly into a massive library catalog. Now, when someone has a question, Google knows exactly where to find the answer.

Finally, there’s ranking. When someone performs a search, Google’s algorithms quickly evaluate indexed pages to determine the most relevant and valuable results to display. Factors such as content quality, relevance, site authority, and user experience all influence where a website appears in search engine results. Ranking is like a librarian deciding which books to recommend first based on their quality, popularity, and relevance to what you’re looking for. Google’s algorithms do the same, choosing the best web pages to show you at the top of your search results.

Stage	What Google Does	What It Looks For	How an Agency Helps
Crawl	Bots discover pages	Fast load, clean code, valid robots.txt	Log-file analysis & crawl-budget fixes
Index	Pages go into Google’s “library”	Structured data, canonical signals, topical consistency	Schema mapping & entity alignment
Rank	Results are ordered in milliseconds	Relevance, authority, UX, engagement signals	Content strategy, link earning, UX audits

Common Reasons Your Website Might Not Be Performing Well With Google

1. Your site isn’t indexed – just because you made the site doesn’t mean Google has found it. Or, perhaps Google didn’t see the value in crawling and indexing your pages.
   • Check by entering this into Google – site:yourwebpage.com
   • Submit your sitemap via Google Search Console.
2. Blocked by Robots.txt or Noindex Tags
   • Ensure your robots.txt file isn’t disallowing crawlers.
   • Remove any unintended noindex tags.
3. Technical SEO Issues
   • Identify and fix crawl errors and broken links.
   • Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and loads quickly (speed and performance).
4. Low-Quality or Duplicate Content
   • Avoid thin content and duplicate pages.
   • Focus on creating unique, valuable content.
5. Lack of Backlinks
   • Build high-quality backlinks to increase authority. Google considers backlinks as signals of popularity.
6. Keyword Optimization Issues
   • Ensure you’re targeting the right keywords with appropriate search intent.
7. Manual Penalties or Algorithmic Filters
   • Check Google Search Console for any manual actions.
   • Stay updated with algorithm changes that might affect your rankings.

When to Seek an SEO Agency

Many businesses start by handling SEO in-house (DIY), either through a marketing team or a tech-savvy staff member. While that can work early on, SEO is a deep, ever-evolving discipline that quickly becomes more demanding than expected. From algorithm updates and competitive analysis to advanced technical audits, structured data, and AI-driven content strategies, the workload grows fast. Eventually, bandwidth or expertise, or both, become limiting factors.

That’s when it makes sense to bring in outside experts. Partnering with an experienced agency like Greenlane means you’re not just keeping up—you’re staying ahead. We help fill gaps, scale strategies, and bring fresh perspective grounded in data and experience, allowing your internal team to focus on what they do best while we drive meaningful, measurable growth in search.

A professional SEO agency does more than implement best practices—they bring advanced strategies, tools, and insights that most internal teams simply don’t have time or access to. Agencies stay ahead of algorithm changes, leverage enterprise-level tools for competitive research and forecasting, and apply proven frameworks for improving everything from technical health to content performance.

They also offer an outside perspective, spotting opportunities and issues that may go unnoticed internally. Whether it’s building authority through digital PR, engineering content for AI overviews, or optimizing for zero-click searches, an experienced agency brings a deeper level of strategy and expertise. At Greenlane, we combine data, creativity, and decades of hands-on experience to push your organic growth further and faster. We’d love to chat with you when you are ready.

DIY Works For	Signs You’ve Outgrown DIY	What an SEO Agency Adds
Basic on-page edits, small blogs, local sites	Plateaued traffic, resource crunch, confusing updates, international or e-commerce ambitions	Senior strategists, enterprise tools, cross-channel data, digital PR, AI-content engineering, revenue forecasting