What's The Deal About Zero-Click Searches?

What are Zero-Click Searches?

A zero-click search or a no-click search is a search result that doesn’t send users to a non-search engine or third-party website. Now, the term wasn’t coined by Google itself, but by digital marketing and SEO professionals. They came up with it after Google launched the featured snippets update on the search engine back in 2019.

Featured snippets are basically short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google’s search results page. The purpose of those snippets is to answer a searcher’s query right then and there, without the need to click on a specific website. If it’s a simple enough question or query, then a user can get instant results. Let’s say you want to find out the weather in your area, then a simple query of the weather in your location will return with a featured snippet that answers your question. It eliminates the need to click on a link or website, making that particular query a “zero-click” search.

What's Wrong with Zero-Click Searches?

For the longest time, businesses and marketers have built their SEO strategies to ensure that websites get found by the right people and click on them. Hopefully, these users subscribe to a service or purchase something, which helps a business a lot. But what happens when these users don’t feel the need to click on your website’s link on the SERPs? That’s what happens with zero-click searches.

Before this feature was introduced, a typical search results page would show you links to different web pages after typing a query just as it is today, minus the snippets. You’d then click on a link or more until you reach the correct information. That could take some time, but it allows users to discover different websites and diverts organic traffic into these web pages.

Since the featured snippets, this isn’t always the case anymore. In a recent web study published by SparkToro, nearly 65% of Google searches ended without a click to another web property between January to December 2020. They also pointed out that no-click searches cause Google to send less traffic to non-search engine sites. 

Why Did Google Roll Out Featured Snippets?

While Google didn’t intend to create zero-click searches, featured snippets paved the way for it. The search engine giant had several reasons for rolling it out, which are:

• Changing Search Behaviors - Nowadays, weather forecasts, sports scores, and currency conversions are examples of information that people would want to have quick access to. After all, if you only want to know the definition of “ubiquitous” or the latest NBA Playoffs scores, you don’t really want to dive into a full-length blog post or article to get the info.
  
  
• Catering to Local Searches - Getting information from snippets goes beyond businesses that rely on traditional clicks. A good example is getting the store name, contact details, and phone number of a local restaurant or business. This could easily lead to a website visit or a physical store visit.
  
  
• Driving More Traffic to Apps - Speaking of traditional clicks, a search result that directs users to an app may also count as a zero-click search. If you’re, let’s say, searching for a movie or TV show that leads to streaming apps, then this drives more traffic to them instead of websites. The same also works on product searches that redirect you to social media apps or online marketplace apps.

At the end of the day, zero-click searches have been proven to be quite counterproductive to the digital marketing strategies of SEO agencies, marketers, and of course, business owners like you. This also greatly impacts pay-per-click-ads and those who heavily rely on search engine marketing tactics.

How to Adapt SEO Strategies for Zero-Click Searches

Zero-click searches present a huge challenge for many. While it doesn’t completely eliminate the need for users to click on websites, you need to alter your strategies to adapt to this zero-click search landscape. Here are some tips to consider:

1. Focus on Clicks-per-Search During Keyword Research
   
   In the era of zero-click searches, clicks-per-search (CPS) is one neglected metric that could help you rethink your strategy. CPS data takes into account the rate of traffic these keywords obtain from people finding your page through SERPs, rather than simply how many people are looking for the term itself. This makes it particularly useful in countering zero-click searches. If your pages rank well but achieve a low CPS, then you’ll know it’s time to re-optimize your content for related keywords with a better CPS rate.
   
   
2. Target Featured Snippet Positions
   
   Featured snippets basically extract the information they present from other websites too. That gives you an opportunity to get featured on those snippets, which is something you should be aiming for. There are tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush that tell you which queries already exist with featured snippets, which could help you adjust your content and make it “snippet-worthy” for the search results pages. To achieve this, make sure your content is valuable enough and concise to give it a better chance of being featured. Lastly, keep it under 55 words.
   
   
3. Use Relevant Images and Optimize Thoroughly
   
   Optimization is much more critical now than ever, and that includes image search optimization. Aside from utilizing SEO best practices, you also need to incorporate striking and relevant images throughout your website. You also need to pair that with relevant image filenames and alt-text for greater optimization. This is because the image in a featured snippet is often provided by a different website than the one from which the text content is taken. This means that, even if your website’s text didn’t get featured on a snippet, your image could possibly still be featured.

Adapt and Leverage Zero-Click Searches

Zero-click searches pose a great challenge to many websites, marketers, web design agencies, and business owners and will continue to do so. While there’s little chance that featured snippets will be going away, you need to adapt to these changes so you won’t be affected too much by it.

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