Insights
The rise of zero-click in search
Zero-click search, zero-click content, and zero-click marketing.
ln the past 2 weeks, I've seen more chat about 'zero-click' online.
I recall it was Rand Fishkin who coined the term 'zero-click search' back in 2021.
Zero-click content and zero-click marketing followed.
In 2024, an estimated 58.5% of Google searches ended without a click.
Since mid last year, featured snippets and AI overviews may have increased that number slightly.
It's noticeable that zero-click answers and AI overviews dominate a number of big search categories.
This means if the audience you're trying to attract uses generic and informational queries, you must find alternative ways for people to find your brand.
A two-pronged approach to search
On one hand, we need to shift our focus from solely driving clicks to delivering immediate value that shows within search results.
On the other hand, we need to look at where our target audience is likely to discover our brand (and our clients' brands).
SEOs and marketers are experimenting more with social media, industry news sites, and video for brand awareness and content distribution.
Why are they doing this?
I believe that while traditional search has always been a great foundation, it is turning into a reward for other successful marketing activities.
You can use short-form, high-value content to answer questions on social media, provide expert insights for industry publications, and feature in newsletters or YouTube Shorts.
The point of zero-click marketing is to answer people's questions and get visibility within the search results.
Your brand may not always get direct traffic, but you'll be seen as a useful source of information, which improves brand recognition and trust.
The point is, we must continue to experiment with and diversify our SEO and marketing tactics.
A strong brand presence will naturally improve your search performance.
Is zero-click affecting your SEO strategy?
Hit reply and tell me what you're doing.
AI overviews in search...again
Last week's 'Moz Whiteboard Friday' by Tom Capper included this graph:
About 1 in 10 of the 46,000 keywords he tracked had an AI overview of some kind.
As you can see, the majority of those were for informational - or TOFU - content.
If you look further down, AI overviews appear far less in transactional or even navigational searches.
As Capper said, "...for the most part…these are informational leaning, sort of already low-click SERPs."
While Capper provides an overview of his findings he does not offer advice on HOW to rank in AI Overviews.
Like many of you, Lily Ray questions all the advice on how to rank in AIO:
For all the people talking about how to rank in LLMs, especially Google’s AI Overviews, I’d love to see the evidence.
What does AI-driven search mean for SEO?
I suggest sticking with the fundamentals, so your site and content is easily understood by both users and AI systems.
- Prioritize depth and scope in your content creation. Instead of targeting single keywords, aim to answer a wide range of related questions within a given topic.
- Keep in mind the different search intents (informational, navigational, transactional) for targeted optimization.
- Focus on quality over quantity in your link-building strategies. Earning backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites is more important than ever.
- Technical SEO needs to encompass AI optimization. Websites must be structured for easy crawling and interpretation by AI systems, using schema markup and structured data to increase content understanding.
AI overviews are a relatively new feature, and their behavior and impact are likely to change.
As always; monitor and adapt.
Google doesn't care about SEO tools
A mini panic ensued last week as a number of SEO data-tracking tools stopped reporting.
While this was going on, Google told TechCrunch that it is forcing users to turn on JavaScript to use Search.
It seems this action caused the issue of non-functioning tools.
But, is there more to it?
I read about 20 articles and posts on this.
Patrick Hathaway of Sitebulb, gave the most plausible explanation for what's really going on:
I've condensed his comments, but you can read the entire post on LinkedIn.
"...is this an attack on keyword tools?
Very unlikely, in my opinion.
It is much more likely to be a reaction to a growing threat to Google's dominance - LLMs like ChatGPT becoming seen as an adequate/better replacement to Google search.
By making their data more difficult to access at scale, Google are protecting themselves against LLMs training their data sets based on Google's data.
Google do not want LLMs accessing their search results or their AI Overviews (and which queries trigger them) - that's the reason for this outage. Keyword tracking tools are just collateral damage."
My take: Google does not care about SEO tools, they care about other search and answer engines eating into their market share.
I wonder what - or who - is next?
I hope these insights help. For more tips, follow me here.
