Good morning, Search Marketer, I've got to go off on a bit of a rant on this zero click business.
Rand Fishkin of Sparktoro came out with a study saying about 65% of all searches in Google Search do not lead to a click to a website. Shortly after, Google responded saying Google sends more traffic to the open web every year. One study says Google is gatekeeping the search traffic and Google saying, no we don't. Who do you believe?
The truth is, both are right and both can be believed. The beauty of data, especially statistics, is that you can make numbers look like anything you want. You see it a lot during election season, where one politician can use the same data to say the complete opposite of what their opponent is saying. One of my favorite topics in college was statistics because it was so easy to take the same data source and use different statistical models to make the data say what you want it to say.
That being said, does this make a difference to you as a marketer? It does not. We can complain and whine about it but it doesn't matter. The truth is, I believe the study that was presented by Rand Fishkin told the story Rand wanted to tell. The response Google gave told the story Google wanted to present. Both are honestly wrong and not telling the full truth.
There is absolutely no way that 65% of all searches do not lead to a click to a website. But even if that is true, those clicks can lead to driving directions to your local restaurant for curbside pickup or those clicks can lead to a tap on a phone number to call the local hardware store to find out what to order to fix the leaky sink in the house. Searchers can be refining their queries and not clicking on any website during that first search but then end up going to a car dealership down the road and buying that new Jeep Wrangler they always wanted.
Google's goal is to satisfy the searcher and we search marketers don't always think about it from the searcher's perspective. Trust me, I didn't think about it this way for years. But if you search for the weather, Google wants to tell you the weather and not make you click on a website to find who won last night's tennis match. At the same time, there are many queries that drive people to websites, including featured snippets that, if you remember, we lost for a few weeks earlier this month, and we were all complaining we wanted back.
So don't read a blanket study about how bad Google is and take it at face value and, at the same time, don't read Google's official response and take that at face value. There is a middle ground. These studies can be more transparent and, at the same time, Google can and should be more transparent with its data. As search marketers, we have to focus on how to get the best and most useful traffic to our customers and focus less of our time on complaining about who is right or wrong.
Barry Schwartz,
Search Peacemaker
