Recently a case study was done by Rand Fishkin, on the number of clicks any website getting from the organic traffic of Google search engine.
And it has surprised everyone, that in the year 2020 more than 65% of total global searches are not giving any organic traffic or clicks to any ranking website.
Hence, everybody concerned about the Google monopoly and the future of the publishers especially Bloggers, who are mainly relied on Google organic traffic.
So if you are not sure, what is Zero click search and how it impacts website organic traffic, and what will be the future of Blogging?
Then in this guide, I have done a complete analysis from various sources to give you the best knowledge about the impact of Zero clicks searches on your website or blog.
But for quick answer you can also watch the video.
What is Zero Click Search?
If you are searching for any particular query in a search engine like Google and you will find the result instantly either in Paragraph, list post, or knowledge graph.
Then you will not click on any website displayed in the Google SERP and leaving the search engine immediately, that is known as Zero click search.
Just for an example, i have searched in Google "Who is kirtish vyas", Google instantly displayed my bio from UDEMY.
If the user found adequate required information, then he will not click on any of the websites coming on top 10 or any pages.
This is called zero-click search or in simple words a search without any clicks to any of the 3rd party website ranking in Google.
How Many Zero Click searches?
Recently, Rand Fishkin took the data from a SimilarWeb and analyzed that in the year 2020 total searches were approx 5.1 Trillion worldwide.
Out of those total searches, more than 64.82% of searches were without any clicks to the organic site or zero-click searches.
Out of the total zero-click searches, below was the classification.
This is quite interesting, that mobile searches were having more zero-clicks as compared to desktop.
I have done more research on the same that how this zero-click searches been increased in past 5 years and got the report publishes on search metrices.
Now according to that study in the year 2020, this number is increased to 64.82% which is around 15% more than 2019 and that is what the concern for the content marketing industries.
Why Zero Click Searches Increasing?
Now it is obvious to find out the reason for increasing the zero-click searches and the only reason for the same is the featured snippet and knowledge graph.
Feature snippet is the short and crisp answer to searched query coming at the top of the search engine, which answers the user query directly.
Google optimizing and answering more and more queries in the form of feature snippets as you saw in my above example.
Here are a couple of more examples.
I have searched two queries one is to know the age and the other is a how-to guide and Google displayed both answers in short and crisp form.
Now there are fewer chances that anyone will click on any of the organic results.
This is called feature snippet and Google is making these things better every day and there are potential chances of increasing zero-click searches.
What is the Impact of Zero Click Searches on Organic Traffic?
Now i am sure you are concern about how the Zero-click searches impacting the organic traffic of your website?
And when i analyzed more and tried to get the number of searches, the things were surprising.
According to the HubSpot report, in the year 2019 the total-approx searches were around 2 trillion globally.
Now let's read the latest report published by Rand Fishkin and it will surprise you that the total number of searches were increased to approx 5.1 trillion in the year 2020.
And this total is more than 2.5 times the total searches of the year 2019. so let's do the little math.
What is the 49% of the 2 trillion searches? It will be around 0.98 trillion Zero click searches in the year 2019.
Now check the 64.8% of the 5.1 trillion searches of 2020, which will be around 3.3 trillion zero click searches.
So in summary, below are the number of clicks organic websites received in the last 2 years.
So the simple math says, the number of organic clicks increased with an increase in search volume, and similarly we have more zero click searches.
So what all are those queries which attracting more zero clicks and i am thinking these are those possible queries, which earlier user not even searching in the Google but last year due to lockdown they have started.
In the above three examples, you have noticed that the chances are likely that Google will show results either in feature snippet or knowledge graph.
I am sure now you got more clarity on the zero-click search and its potential impact on the organic search.
Futre of Blogging with Zero Click Searches
The blogging community is the one concerned about a lot on recent data analysis of no Clicks due to zero-click searches.
But for us, there is Good and the best news.
The good news is the number of searches every year increasing which means more traffic potential.
The best news is feature snippets, which Google shows on the top search result are nothing else than the website of bloggers like you and me.
If you have read my future of SEO blog post there i explained, how Google is focusing a lot to rank faster new websites if they are targeting the user queries directly.
Even the passage indexing is the reason behind the conversion of the featured snippet, so no matter your site has the authority or not you can cross the top 100 pages and get position #1 in Google SERP.
That means, Google is optimizing content best for the user and also asking the content publisher to focus on direct answering instead of writing long form content.
There are a couple of strategies we Bloggers need to improve such as
Start adding values and more focus on targeting the user queries instead rely on any SEO tool to find SEO difficulty.
I am sure, this has given you major highlights on what is do's and don't for any Blogger or content publisher, going forward only genuine and original content will win the race.
Wrap Up on Zero Click searches
You will keep getting such studies every year but we all are familiar with how internet usage increased in the year 2020 after COVID.
More people searching in Google and all businesses are going live and many more searches in Google.
Google itself announced that every day more than 10-15% of searches are completely fresh and new, for which Google is not able to find suitable results from the existing published content.
So find such opportunities and remember one thing, you don't need search volume in trillion as if your site is driving decent traffic and you are making money that's all you need to care about.
I am sure this has given you the brighter side of Google's recent and upcoming changes and i love to hear your thought on the same in the comment box.
If you found this resource helpful and interesting then help me to reach out to this awesome piece with those who are in need. Thanks in advance.
