A new phenomenon is taking a hold of the search engine results pages. It’s called zero-click searches and it’s forcing business owners and website developers alike to rethink how the content on their website functions.
What is Zero-Click?
Zero-Click means that the person who is conducting the search never clicks on a website or ad.
Example: I’ve recently considered hiring a company to mow my lawn on a bi-weekly basis. So I’ve done a bit of research on landscape companies who offer this. I’ve most recently done a search for “lawn maintenance in McKinney, Texas”. As with most location-based searches, the first thing that pops up in the map pack. This offers enough information to make a quick decision on who to call based on the proximity to my search AND the star rating.
There is enough information here to allow me to contact 3 companies and get quotes from them for their services.
What does this mean?
It means that all of the SEO work that has been done on these companies websites is being circumvented. A focus has been placed on managing their presence via Google My Business, which is where this information is being pulled. With all of the information necessary for me to make a quick decision presented to me within the search engine, I don’t need to click on anything further. It’s all right there in front of me.
A Few Different Options
There are also a few different styles of Zero-Click searches that you can run into. One of the most popular is answering a question. In my decision to search for a lawn maintenance company, I searched for “How often should I mow my lawn?”. Again, I was given the answer without ever having to click on a website.
By creating more opportunities for Google to provide information to searchers without ever taking the user to a website, they are effectively redirecting traffic from websites and keeping it in-house. At some point in time, I fully believe in a future where we may not have to leave the Google, Bing, etc. environment to navigate the web.
What does that mean for SEO?
Without beating around the bush, it means you have to have your ducks in a row. All of them. Since a zero-click search won’t show up in website analytics reports, you have to rely on Google Search Console stats to see how successful your site is in providing answers.
Every business who derives leads, phone calls, contact form submissions to sustain their bottom line needs to make sure all opportunities for Zero-Click searches can lead back to them. This means you have to be vigilant about managing your local listings. Filling out the information from top to bottom without spamming and getting removed from the indices (the exact opposite of what we’re trying to do).
It also means that the content on your website has to be top notch. It has to answer questions that your potential clients ask. In doing so, you increase the likelihood of a searcher clicking on the link to your website to read more information and find out what you do.
Us here at Baggies Web Solutions focus on making your website as good as it can be, so we can bridge the gap between zero-click and getting the phone call.