Katie Harper

Mackerel Media’s Search and Digital Marketing Roundup – February 2025

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Welcome to our February round up of the latest updates in SEO, social media and digital marketing. There have been quite a few notable updates this month, including advancements in Google’s predictive ad models, changes to LinkedIn conversion reporting and recent findings in the popularity of AI-powered search.

 

Landing Your Page in the Spotlight

Earlier this month, ​Google introduced a new ads prediction model which is able to evaluate the effectiveness of a landing page for Google ads. This update helps to ensure that whatever pages are linked to offer a good user experience and relevant content to the search query. Any ad which directs a user to a poor, hard to navigate page is less likely to rank in ad results. This recent update means that brands need to ensure that the landing page offers relevant information to the users query and offers a good navigational experience to ensure that their ads remain visible.

 

Tracking Conversions through Clicks and Handshakes! 

LinkedIn has updated their advertising platform by introducing new Conversions API (CAPI) and the Revenue Attribution Report (RAR) features. Their Conversions API report allows brands to connect first-party online and offline data directly into LinkedIn, making it easier to track conversions from sources such as website actions, phone sales and live in-person events. Their Revenue Attribution report allows business to business marketers to connect their sales data into LinkedIn campaigns to measure campaign performance such as return on ad spend and pipeline growth. These features have been added to make it easier to calculate return on ad spend and allows brands to further optimise their internal and external campaign performance.

 

 

ChatGPT Traffic Soars

On the AI front, a recent study by Semrush revealed that between July and November 2024, the number of domains receiving traffic from ChatGPT increased from under 10,000 to over 30,000 daily, revealing the popularity growth of users searching for information with ChatGPT. They also found that approximately 70% of ChatGPT prompts are unique and don’t fall under traditional search intent categories (navigational, informational, commercial, transactional), which suggests that users are finding new ways to obtain information and solve problems. With the recent announcement of ChatGPT search becoming available to all users without requiring an account, the popularity of AI search is expected to grow even further.

 

 

Elliott Henderson, Technical SEO Consultant at Mackerel Media shares his thoughts on optimising for AI-powered search:

While there are no official guidelines for ensuring that your website is included in AI-generated search results, here are some general best practices which could help improve your chances of being featured:

Create High Quality Content – Whilst ranking in the top 10 organic results is not a guarantee your content will rank in AI Overviews and ChatGPT search, it does help if your content performs well for related user queries. Ensure your content is optimised to answer user queries with in-depth explanations, including relevant primary and secondary keywords. The more detailed your page is, the more likely it is to be recognised as valuable by AI search engines.

Improve Readability and Content Structure – Ensure that your content is easy to read and understood by AI. Place key information higher up on the page for relevancy. Make your content digestible with bullet points, numbered lists, comparison tables, shorter sentences, concise paragraphs and clear headings which can be easily referenced and summarised. Also keep your content up to date to maintain relevancy.

Optimise Heading Elements – Ensure your website has a keyword optimised heading structure so that AI understands the flow and relevant sections of the content on the page. Add a table of contents with relevant anchor links and a key takeaways summary which aids in navigation and contextual understanding.

Optimise Site Structure – Organise your domain with logical page and category hierarchies which make it easier for AI bots to crawl your site effectively. Include clear directory structures, descriptive URLs, an accessible sitemap and optimised page title tags.

Implement Structure Data – Use structured data to help AI understand your content more accurately. Implement relevant structured data types such as ImageObject, FAQPage and HowTo schema for informational content. Also make use of industry specific schema types such as LegalService for legal firms, RealEstateAgent for property renting and sales, and Hotel and Collections schema for travel websites. 

Allow AI Crawlers – Ensure that your site can be crawled effectively by AI crawlers. This means not blocking ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI bots in your robots.txt file and firewall rules. There are different bots for retrieving data vs. collecting training data, and whilst there may be overlap between the two, ensuring that retrieving data bots are allowed helps AI search access and reference your content.

Optimise for Speed – Many AI bots have limited time frames to retrieve content (from 1-5 seconds). Ensure that your site performs quickly by compressing images, using CDN and caching and minimising the amount of excess JavaScript and/or plugins which AI crawlers have a hard time rendering.