Strategy
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Fewer searches end in a click every year. What that means for where your content needs to show up.
Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad have been talking about this concept of "zero click marketing" for a while. It's the idea that the internet has moved into a new era of walled gardens, AI answers, and dark social communities that discourage you from linking out to your own websites.
Translation: No one is going to your website, anymore.
- Google sends 85% of the clicks to websites on the open web.
- But in 2020, more than 75% of searches ended WITHOUT a click.
- and in 2024 they launched AI Overviews to make that worse.
- YouTube has become the 2nd largest search engine — and its all videos.
- Instagram and Tiktok are video first too, so there are no clicks.
- Even the text-heavy platforms like Facebook and Linkedin suppress links.
- Podcasts are growing, but attribution is near impossible with audio.
- "Social" media has moved into private and encrypted groups like Discords, Slacks, WhatsApp and Facebook Groups where tracking isn't possible.
- and then you've got everyone moving to a "cookie less" browser that won't let you really track everything like we used to anyway.
So... there are far less clicks to be had.
Even if you get a click... you can't really track it.
The major platforms own all the attention.
And they're trying hard to keep it all for themselves.
This is the current reality of the internet.
This is the playing field we're competing on.
And yet....
We're all still running playbooks that worked in the early 2000's.
Most marketers are still hung up on driving clicks to their websites.
All of marketing's activities are judged on last touch attribution models that favor the conversion event and point of sale and IGNORE everything else.
We're crying about losing our website traffic.
But we're not really investing in places people actually ARE.
We need to start thinking seriously about how we invest our budget.
Start moving money into:
- video first platforms like YouTube and Tiktok.
- influencer marketing on podcasts, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
- our own content marketing that's NATIVE to these platforms.
- email lists that WE OWN and don't depend on algorithms for reach.
- brand building activities that make us CREDIBLE and MEMORABLE.
We need to do more to go where the people actually are and stop holding onto this false notion that the internet works like it did in 2010.
Otherwise, we've got some real problems coming our way.
Follow me on LinkedIn for more stories like this:
Matthew Proctor, CEO @ Narrative Bent
Led content and SEO at HomeLight from Series A to a $1B valuation.
I've worked in SEO for 16 years, and I've always measured it in revenue. I was employee #27 at HomeLight, where I led content and SEO and grew the team to about 30 people as the company went from Series A to a $1B valuation. Before that, I ran enterprise SEO programs at BrightEdge and Catalyst. In 2023 I started Narrative Bent to do the same work for proptech, fintech, and B2B companies with long sales cycles.
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