Rand and Zero Clicks
Recently Rand Fishkin posted this article about where click traffic goes after a search. He’s got some good points about optimizing for Zero Click traffic that SEO’s should be taking note of. However, I think the whole SEO is dead narrative is overblown. If anything, this data shows something else.
I’ll explain.
Let’s look at some of the numbers
– 41.5% of searches result in a click
– 37.1% of searches result in the browsing session ending
– 21.4% of searches go to another search
Of the Actual Clicks
– 70.5% go to an organic search result
– 28.5% go to a Google property
○ YouTube, Maps, Images, News, etc.
– 1% go to paid ads
Rand continues to express concerns about how Google’s properties have a disproportionate share of the traffic. Something that I concur with. Google is not the “Don’t be Evil” company anymore.
However, I’d argue a few points.
Breaking Down Where That Traffic Goes Inside Google
Do we really care? Maybe not.
I’m curious to really understand how much of this self-preferencing behavior gets “stuck” in Google. Offering a platform to organize data better is fine, but you:
A) Can’t cut out the competition
B) Can’t keep traffic to yourself as a Search Engine
So, let’s look at some of these Google Properties and make some educated guesses since I don’t have a dump of the data Rand used to create this report.
Clicks to Google Maps are probably for things like directions, addresses, the like. These kinds of search traffic are going to be captured by a property that focuses on directions and navigation.
Google Maps keeps this traffic because there’s no reason to leave. Strange that no other map provider ever crops up anymore.
Yes, Map Quest, I do remember you.
Moving on….
Google News, well that’s going to Google News trusted sources. News outlets are still getting this traffic, so it’s not really “stuck” traffic.
Images? The searcher probably wanted to “look” at something, find an image to use for something, or a similar intent. That’s probably going to either stay at the search page for a quick download of the image or go on to the page that the image is hosted on for more context and information.
YouTube is where it gets interesting
With YouTube, you have a much wider variety of intent for the search. Entertainment, learning, news, and more. As a platform, much of the longer form, and probably short form content that was once put up as written articles, can be made into a video. Clicks going to YouTube doesn’t signal a problem, necessarily to me. Instead, content creators are getting traffic, hopefully smaller and independent ones that deliver value to their audience.
If it were not for the suspicious behavior of Google when dealing with other video hosting platforms, I’d say that this is just a normal trend in the content and information consumption habits of people on the web.
Arguably, YouTube is a replacement for content that would normally be hosted on a website. Traffic that, no YouTube existing, either click off the page or move to another webpage.
Now with YouTube, it’s probably likely that the visitor keeps going through videos during a research phase. But how would this be any different if the video or content was on a website other than YouTube?
This is, to me, a chance to build brand awareness, like you would with any other digital marketing push.
I’d say that even if the clicks get “stuck” in YouTube, it’s not the end of the world. This traffic is going to be “top of funnel” anyway. YouTube or no.
Zero Clicks? Zero Concern?
Before I get to other numbers, let’s look at those Zero Click behaviors.
The 21.4% of searches that result in another search, this really doesn’t surprise me. How often do you end up refining your search terms? Adding something, removing something, rephrasing the search? This kind of “searching again” behavior, I would intuit, means that the searcher didn’t find what they were looking for and needed to refine the search. If anything, 21.4% is pretty decent, that means that most of the time, the intent is fulfilled, and the search engine did its job.
The rest of the time, the searcher needed to refine their query, or they didn’t yet know how other people were searching for what they were looking for. This is probably likely long tail keywords.
What does make me wonder is the session ending results.
This could go two ways in my mind. Either the short snippet or answer box on the search results page answered the question, or something else did.
If we think of this as a “cart abandonment” problem why would someone not go through to “checkout”, a website?
They get interrupted by life? Sure.
They find a very short answer in a headline? Sure.
But maybe the answer box on specific queries is preventing clicks from going through to a website that would normally get those clicks for answers.
It’s a fine line that Google needs to walk here between keeping this traffic “in the search box”, answering questions quickly, and allowing traffic to get through to other websites. Obviously, I don’t want to spend an extended amount of time looking for an answer, clicking multiple links, but where’s that line between fast answers and letting traffic go?
How much of this traffic should, normally go to a link in the organic results, but leaves because of an answer box? Rand is not able to surface that data in his report, if its available at all.
Two Big Numbers
• 70.5% of clicks go to organic search
This tells me that organic search and reach is still very relevant. People are going to organic search results. They are going to websites on the open web, they are using search for what it’s supposed to do, bring people to websites.
So SEO, organic marketing is very much, not dead.
It’s working as intended if anything is damaging organic traffic, it’s the answer box. And then, that’s not for certain. Only Google knows that, and despite my mistrust of them, they do have incentives to keep the web operating as it does.
• 1% to paid ads
Now this is what’s really interesting. If anything is dead, PPC is.
Pay Per Click Ad Managers will probably push back and say, we deliver great returns on investment, we do very well with our conversion rates, and the search terms that we target give us much better Click Through Rates.
Yes, and I’m not saying that PPC is not effective for its use case. But paid ads get shown on only 20% of all search terms. They can’t easily capture long tail queries; they can’t build brand awareness and provide value to searchers in the same way that organic SEO development can.
PPC is fast, it’s the rabbit.
Gets traffic quickly, delivers conversions, and gets people when they are ready to buy something.
But SEO is the rest of the equation. It builds brand awareness it gets customers in the door though word of mouth. It gets you loyalty and recognition, it gets buzz going.
When done well it gives you an ever-expanding army that tells people, “Cool shit over here”!
So long as Google and other search engines exist, actually fulfilling searcher intent, and directing that traffic to the right website, SEO will continue.
That’s why SEO is not dead, Zero Click Searches are not the end of the world, and PPC is just one part of a much larger marketing effort.
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