The great mystery of positioning in Google: what is more important SEO or SEM? And what is higher priority? appear in the first positions in the search results? Or actually appear lower but users click on your company link? Or better, Do we really click on those results? The reality, according to the data presented in the latest Semrush study, could be quite different.
We all know how important it is for a company that its website or a specific URL that it wants to promote -be it a specific product or a landing page created for the occasion- appears in the first positions when we perform a search. However, the so-called ‘clickless searches’ win by a landslide. Or what is the same: when a search is performed, but despite the results we end up not clicking on any option.
According to Semrush, the popular SaaS platform for online visibility and marketing management, 57% of users who use the internet through their mobile devices, and 53% who do so from their computers, do not even bother to click. Which is an added handicap for those companies that spend real fortunes on Google Adwords campaigns to ‘buy’ those clicks, thereby increasing their positioning and gaining customers or potential customers.
With these data on the table, what should companies do? It is not about undoing campaigns or thinking that Google search results are useless, far from it. They just need to reconsider and better redirect their SEO and marketing strategy to satisfy the curiosity and needs of users – so that they do click on the links – and to adapt to Google’s infrastructure.
Around the Google algorithm
If there is something that drives those responsible for digital marketing and company strategy upside down, it is the capricious and changing algorithms of Google. These changes can change an entire strategy, causing greater volatility in the SERPs. That is, the indicators that offer useful information directly on the results page.
According to said report. Google is working to meet the needs of users, creating a better shopping experience for transactional searches and rewarding valuable content with higher rankings. And how does this translate? In a better overall search experience enabling the continued growth of Google’s business model.
It should be noted that, in the past, any user could access a seller’s website from Google to search for products by clicking on the seller’s paid or organic link. Google now presents these search results directly in a very visual and user-friendly way.
With all that, online stores must have their technical SEO ready for their products to appear in the SERP for purchase inquiries. In an e-commerce landscape where 83% of all traffic comes from users navigating directly to their websites, Google is disrupting that pattern by adding valuable shopping features to the SERP, like the ability to filter products by seller, brand, price or reviews.
The importance of quality content
The data is what it is. In 2021, organic traffic to e-commerce sites fell by 23%, but watch out! Non-click searches increased: 45% of all clicks on “desktop”, i.e. on desktop or computer, and 43% of all clicks on mobile were organic. So organic channels and content remain the main drivers of traffic.
“The improved search experience on click-free searches is a good deal for Google, generating more revenue for the same number of queries by keeping users in its ecosystem of products and increasing ad exposure,” explains Marcus Tober, Director of Enterprise Solutions at Semrush.
