November 28, 2019

Why over 50% of Google searches now result in no clicks to websites

For decades the golden rule of SEO has been clear: to convince Google that your content best satisfies a search query so that it’s your page that is served high in the results. When this happens often enough you get ‘click throughs’ and ‘free’ traffic to your website.

But what if Google doesn’t need your content anymore? Or to be more specific, ‘digs out’ your content and displays it directly on its results pages.

I’m Ben Carew, the host of ‘SEO Hacks for SME’s’. In this video I’ll reveal why over 50% of Google searches now result in no clicks at all – and what you can do about it.

Over the last few years you may have noticed how Google has changed the look and feel of the search engine results page.

Nowadays users often see rich listings, knowledge panels, and video carousels.

Ever wonder what the effect of all this is to Australian business owners who publish their content on Google?

You guessed it, way less clicks to websites overall. In fact a milestone was passed in 2019 where for the first time a majority of all browser-based searches on Google.com resulted in zero-clicks.

The reason over 50% of searches result in no clicks? Because, as we’ve all seen, Google is often answering the searcher’s query right there on the results page. There’s no need to click to a website and get lost in a new set of pages and navigation challenges – we are all familiar with Google’s “rich snippets’ and are happy to take our answer as easily as possible, in a format we are familiar with, especially on mobile.

So it raises a big question: is SEO still worth it? And what should your Australian SEO company do about it?

The answer is ‘yes’, of course. But it means that in future, as Google accelerates this trend, there will be less clicks to go round. Business owners, website publishers and the digital marketing agencies who serve them need to get smarter – and work harder.

If your traffic for particular keyword has already been reduced by a knowledge pack or ‘rich snippet’, here are a few tactics you can try to take back that SEO traffic:

Go for a longtail version of the search query that is not yet affected
Create a video and try and hi jack the video carousel
Write an ‘epic’ blog post of 1,500+ words that is just so good Google must serve it up first.

If Google’s new ‘walled garden’ strategy sounds familiar, it’s because it is. It’s actually the very thing that became Yahoo’s undoing at the hands of Google 20 years ago.

In fact, SEO guru Rand Fishkin reckons by trying to keep users on it’s own results and web properties for as long as possible, Google has broken the implicit pact it has always had with web publishers:

In the immortal words of Lando Calrissian: “This deal’s getting worse all the time.”
Google launches new featured snippets that make it so no one ever really needs to leave Google to visit a website.https://t.co/mo11QK3X6y pic.twitter.com/ZF8gAeMBl3

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) August 16, 2018