Semrush's rundown of current SEO best practices covers a wide range of ground. A handful of the points apply especially directly to a trade business site. That is particularly true now that AI tools are reading and summarising pages, not just ranking them.
The fundamentals that apply directly to a trade site
- Real experience and real bios on your site, since AI tools and Google both now weigh genuine first hand experience more heavily than polished but generic copy
- Content structured so it can be extracted cleanly: a direct answer near the top of a page, followed by supporting detail, rather than background information buried before the actual answer
- The technical basics still matter: a site that loads quickly on mobile, has no broken links, and is straightforward for Google to crawl
The one statistic worth sitting with
Semrush's data shows that a large share of pages that rank well also load quickly and have a clean technical structure underneath. None of that is new advice. What has changed is the second part. The same clean structure that helps a page rank in Google also helps an AI tool pull an accurate summary from it. A technical SEO foundation is now doing double duty.
For a trade business, the practical takeaway is that the basics have not been replaced by anything more complicated. Clear writing, genuine experience, and a technically sound site remain the foundation, whether the thing reading your page is a person or an AI assistant.