Things are changing in the search results. In many industries, appearing at the top organically isn’t enough. Those results are often pushed down on the search engine results page (SERP).
For key search results to your business:
- Are you appearing in AI overviews?
- Are you present in listing sites appearing organically like Yelp, G2, BBB, other business directories, etc.?
- Are there a lot of ads running? And in this case, are you running ads?
- Are you appearing in ChatGPT and other AI Chatbots?
If you’ve answered no to one or all of those, you could be getting in front of more prospective customers.
To increase visibility, traffic and leads, it’s important to look at the search results for ideas.
At this point in time, many businesses are seeing increases in appearances in search (impressions), but less traffic (clicks) to their respective websites. In some cases, it may be difficult to regain some of this traffic. This is directly the result of AI Overviews.
While regaining and increasing traffic should always be pursued, it’s important to look at things from a different frame of mind.
How do we make the most of the increase in visibility and appearances, where I’m losing traffic and likely won’t regain it?
Let’s get into it.
What Search Results Are Zero-Click?
AI overviews, really the same as typing a question into AI Chatbots, are answering searches right at the top of results. This eliminates the need to click through to a website in many cases.
Even this blog post can make a good example. You search “what is zero click marketing?” and here’s what comes up:
Shout out to SparkToro-they dominate this SERP. Rightfully so, they’ve been talking about it and leading the way for 3+ years. Check out SparkToro for incredible audience research.
While there are links to the side of AI Overviews where the content was pulled from by Google Gemini-again, in a lot of instances users aren’t needing to click through.
How Can I Get Into Zero Click Search Results
To start, normal SEO practices of creating great, helpful, EEAT focused content will encourage your website to be placed in AI Overviews and Chatbots. Just as they do for organic search results.
This may often come in the form of lists, answering a FAQ type of question, tutorials/how-to’s, things like that.
Kind of funny that a “people-first” strategy can also help with AI. Ultimately, robots have gained steam because they help people work and learn more efficiently.
Write great content, optimize the meta-information, title structure (H1/H2/etc.), add ALT tags to images, and you’ve given yourself a solid chance.
Still not appearing (after a bit of time)? Consider implementing schema/structured data to clearly communicate what is on the page to search engine bots.
There is also talk currently about llms.txt, which Yoast recently rolled out for their WordPress plugin. From what I’ve seen, there isn’t any data proving that this file, similar in a way to robots.txt, will do anything. In my opinion, AI is too smart to need hand-holding for indexing content.
Lastly, I linked to an article above about appearing in AI in the intro; there are some more ideas in there, including Bing IndexNow, among other things like keeping your content fresh and up to date. Blog posts from 2020 aren’t going to cut it unless they were one-of-a-kind, linked to a ton, and somehow still completely relevant.
Once you’re appearing in AI Overviews, or for the searches you’re already appearing in, the next step is making the most of those impressions (appearances in search).
How Can I Make the Most of Zero-Click Results My Business is Appearing In?
Getting into the zero-click results is an accomplishment in itself. Now, manipulating those results to make your brand memorable, or encourage another action? That’s A-game work right there.
If you can do this, there are a few things to keep in mind.
- Follow up on other questions/problems users might be dealing with. This may pique their interest and encourage them to click and learn more as a follow-up to their initial question. You can naturally incorporate a hint of it in the AI Overview content you have appearing. Not to mention, you could end up appearing in other AI overviews and generate enough topical authority (authority on a topic) to get more search real estate. If you’re appearing in multiple places, your impressions will increase, but you’ll always have more opportunity at a click from those additional impressions. You can generate ideas for additional content through competitor keyword gap analysis, and exploring “people also ask” and “related searches” in Google.
- Leverage your hot AI Overview topics with visuals. This can promote the user to be more engaged and potentially click through to learn more or see the visual at full size. Visuals drive-up engagement, and that will prove to be true with these AI Overviews, too.
- Leverage visuals and popular content on social media and via email marketing. This can encourage you to continue appearing in AI overviews, but also bridge a gap that solves a user’s problem, while also generating some traffic that could benefit your business in other areas. Even if you get a user to click just to see a visual, a pop-up up or some other attention-grabbers on your website could capture an email subscription, or other inquiry. Here’s an example of how we leveraged visuals/social with our blog post on “The Best Times to Post on Social Media“. Making content shareable is a great idea in any circumstance.
More strategies will come about, but these are the key ones we’re working on now. We’re running our own tests, as are many other digital marketing companies, and it will be very interesting to see the insights that come from that. Making sure your business is present online in AI search features and AI platforms is so incredibly important.
Keep in mind that platforms like Google, their subsidiaries like YouTube, and Social Media Platforms want users to stay with them to drive up metrics and ultimately ad revenue. So you have to play that game.
If you’re leveraging everything mentioned in this post, the worst-case scenario is that you will see more visibility, more topical authority, a stronger brand, and overall improved ranking potential + brand presence. That’s a pretty good worst-case, because if these efforts help you drive more users with download/sign up/purchase intent to your website, that’s what we’re all really aiming for anyway.
Another shout-out to the SparkToro team, Amanda Natividad does an outstanding job of summarizing all of this and providing other articles she and Rand have written on the topic, in this zero-click post from late 2024.
Put Your Business In Front of More Prospective Customers with webFEAT Complete’s AI Digital Marketing Strategies
I try to keep these blog posts as understandable as possible for those not in the digital marketing space, but as you can see with the website and digital marketing jargon I had to utilize in this post, and how fast the search + AI landscape is changing, it might be best to leave this to the pros.
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