Less than two years ago I shared that 64% of Google searches don’t lead to an external website, which I thought was a massive number (which it was). Now that number has climbed to 68% and I suspect it will only get higher. The fact that more than 2/3 of visitors to Google never click on an external website (which was essentially the whole purpose for Google for decades) is stunning.
As Rand Fishkin points out, there’s no good way to fight back directly at this. He says:
“Much as it pains me to say, there’s not much point (nor any hope) of fighting back by simply getting better at SEO. Don’t take that the wrong way — your SEO still matters as much or more than ever before, it just won’t earn you traffic the way it once did. Traffic can fall precipitously even as revenue rises. Our belief and advice is to invest in Zero Click Marketing: earning influence and growing your brand’s awareness without requiring a visit to your website.“
With the big shifts that Google is making in search, this number will likely go up quite a bit through the rest of this year. I don’t think it’ll ever hit 100% (or even close to it), thanks largely to branded searches, but it’ll go up.
As Rand shared, one of the best things you can do is to build your brand influence across the web so that people don’t necessarily need to visit your site — but when they do, they’ll be much further into the buying process.
Check out Rand’s full post on the SparkToro blog for more.
