Digital Marketing Archives

Zero-Click SEO

Caleb Turner on April 15, 2025

Is it the end of ‘the click’? Okay, maybe that’s a tad bit dramatic. If you’ve heard of zero-click marketing, you’ll know that it’s not exactly new, but it’s making serious headway in the digital marketing world, and it’s time for you to hop on board.

See, the quiet revolution we’re seeing online isn’t about long-tail keywords or 3D landing pages (that would be kind of cool, though). Instead, it’s more subtle. Things are happening right in front of you that you probably aren’t noticing.

So, if you’re not updated with the latest trends, you might feel like you’re falling behind and that your business is fading into the background. But if you’re reading this, don’t worry; you’re already one step ahead.

Zero-click SEO is where users can see your content and engage with it, without a single click.

I know, I know. You’ve been spending years focusing on building your business’s website traffic. But zero-click doesn’t mean your efforts have zero value.

Let’s talk about what zero-click SEO is, how it’s changing the online world, and what you can do to avoid being left behind.

What Is Zero-Click SEO?

Normally, SEO focuses on optimizing your content to bring traffic to your website.

Ah, traditional SEO. Those were the good ol’ days. And while the traditional idea behind SEO is still valuable, zero-click SEO is a bit different.

Instead of creating a strategy that drives traffic to your website, zero-click SEO focuses on showing your content where people are already spending their time and consuming content without directly clicking through to it.

What does this mean? This can include:

Featured snippets and AI Overviews on Google
Engaging content posted on your Google Business profile
In-app content on platforms like Instagram and TikTok
AI-generated summaries from tools like Perplexity or ChatGPT
Podcast mentions, newsletter blurbs, and other coverage that doesn’t link out

Now, don’t take it personally. Zero-click SEO is not here to leave your website in the dust. Instead, it’s about influencing people where they already are. And that can be even more powerful than traffic.

Is Zero-Click Taking Over?

It’s a question everyone has when new information like this pops up. With so many things changing, it’s normal to think, is this something I should pay attention to? In short, yes.

According to a study by S p arkToro, almost 60% of all Google Searches end without a click. That’s a lot. This means most people who look up a query on Google end their session without clicking on any results. In other words, most people aren’t going to your website.

What happens to the other 40%? Those users know where they want to go—and that’s great. But for the remaining 60%, they’re still figuring out.

Let’s go over why zero-click SEO is a necessity.

1. Google isn't sending you traffic anymore

It’s time to accept the truth. As you saw above, almost two-thirds of all Google searches end without a single click. I even used an italicized font—that’s how serious it is.

What this means is that Google is answering queries directly within the search results, whether it’s through AI overviews, product previews, featured snippets, or knowledge panels.

Maybe you see this as a bummer because you want people to come to your website. But remember what we spoke about earlier? You know, the 60% of users end their search sessions without making a click? So for most queries, you weren’t getting the traffic anyway.

Instead, you need to look at this from a different angle. Google’s goal is to give people what they want, which is straightforward, concise content that answers their queries.

How will this affect your business? Taking advantage of the advice given in this article will help position you as a trusted expert, influencing the user whether they click or not.

2. Social platforms aren’t link friendly

Sorry, but the glory days of social media as a place to share blog posts and drive traffic are long gone.

And it doesn’t matter which platform we’re talking about, whether Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, or X. Algorithms are deprioritizing content with external links. It’s not a myth, it’s a reality. Hootsuite found that tweets without links receive 25% more engagement than those with links.

Why? Because these platforms want their users to stay on their apps. An external link means they leave the app, and that’s a no-no. If you’ve been on Instagram or X lately, you’ll have noticed they don’t allow clickable links in captions at all.

In this case, you want to focus on creating content on those platforms that are so valuable users won’t want to leave. Sure, you may not get the website traffic you want, but you’ll earn trust and attention.

3. Outreach without links is a winner

Backlinks are the holiest of all when it comes to off-page SEO. However, these days, there’s more that’s usually needed.

If you haven’t seen a link request email in some time, that’s because they’re in your spam folder. Backlinks have been so used and abused by SEOs that they usually end up in spam.

Rather than requesting links, sending pitches that focus on your product, brand, or research as something newsworthy is more relevant. Remember, zero-click SEO is about influencing without the click.

So, getting mentioned in a trusted newsletter, having a soundbite on a podcast, or a shoutout on a subreddit may not bring in traffic, but it’ll help you gain attention and trust.

4. AI and LLMs aren’t into links

We can’t forget this one. Language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI tools like Perplexity and Bing Copilot are the shiny new innovations.

But these platforms aren’t always going to send you traffic.

They like to answer the users’ questions right within their platforms, with no need for backlinks.

You want your brand to be mentioned within your niche—frequently. These platforms base their answers on context and relevancy. If your brand shows consistency in its niche and provides relevant content, these platforms will take information from you. In other words, you need to be everywhere possible that people are talking about your industry. It’s the best way to be seen.

How to Shift to Zero-Click SEO

It’s a lot to take in, we know. If people don’t need to click, how can you measure what’s working?

See, we all know that traffic is a vanity metric, and the digital marketing world needed a shake-up. Traffic doesn’t mean conversions, and we all know that. Here’s what matters more:

Who’s hearing about you?
Are you influencing decision-making?
Are you building brand trust and awareness?
Are the impressions becoming conversions?

You might have seen the LinkedIn post by Wil Reynolds, where he wrote about how his traffic dropped by 41% but his newsletter sign-ups were up by 65%. How does that happen? Because conversions don’t only come from traffic, but also from trust, recommendations, and delivering value wherever the customer finds you.

To pivot your strategy and incorporate zero-click SEO in your business, do the following:

Write for AI

While you should write for your audience, you also want to make sure your content is clear and concise (AI loves that). You should use bullet points, lists, and short paragraphs. Write for your readers and for AI.

Create social content

Create content that doesn’t need a link to prove its value. Focus on storytelling, infographics, accurate data, and tutorials to create content that engages and provides value.

Track the right KPIs

Rather than only focusing on “website visitors” (it’s time to let it go), focus on the following metrics:

Branded search volume
Social engagement and reach
Direct traffic or type-in visits
Conversion rates and revenue
Podcast or media mentions
Share of voice in AI outputs

Don’t only focus on links

Don’t spend all your time and effort worrying about links. Instead, also focus on getting your brand talked about. Connect with journalists and content creators to gain attention and trust.

Influence > Traffic

Zero-click SEO isn’t something new, but it is becoming a serious part of digital marketing. Whether it’s Google or a social media platform, their goal is the same: they all want users to stay on their sites. For AI, this means providing the information they need without them having to leave the platform.

To give users what they want while also getting what you need as a business owner, focus on building influence. It’ll last you longer than a click. So, build trust, show up everywhere, and create the value your audience needs.

Will you get the traffic you want? Maybe not, and you’ll need to accept that, at least in the short run. But what you will get is a deeper, more genuine, and more aligned marketing strategy that you’ve needed all along.

SEO Rank Media believes that the best digital strategies integrate the best of both worlds, leveraging traditional SEO alongside zero-click SEO for a more holistic approach. By balancing efforts to drive website traffic with strategies that capture direct attention through AI, social media, and other zero-click platforms, businesses can maximize their online influence and establish greater trust with their audience. To explore how this dual strategy can be tailored to your business’s unique needs, feel free to reach out and set up a call with our team.

How Digital Marketing Has Evolved: Blogging, Attribution & Omnipresence in 2025

Caleb Turner on March 5, 2025

Marketing in 2025 just isn’t what it used to be. There was a time, a glorious time when hitting “publish” on a blog post was like unlocking a floodgate of traffic. A well-placed keyword here and there, a handful of backlinks, and boom! You were on page one of Google, or at least in the top five.

Fast forward to 2025, and as you’re probably already painfully aware, it’s a totally different game. Consumers don’t just stumble onto blogs and convert overnight. Instead, they hop nonchalantly between Google, Instagram, AI-powered search, email, and social ads. It can also take quite a few of these hops, or “touchpoints,” before they’re ready to make a purchase.

For your business, this means that you can no longer just rely on a blog post or a single ad campaign to get the lead ball rolling. Marketing success today means you need to concentrate on these three things:

Multi-touch attribution, so you know what’s actually driving sales.
Building up and commanding omnipresence, so your brand shows up everywhere your customers are looking.
Creating a steady flow of good content to build trust, not just traffic.

Let’s break down exactly how to do that in 2025.

Blogging in 2025: No Longer Just a Traffic Magnet

Blogging used to be the golden ticket to online success, and brands that leveraged it dominated search results and thrived. Now, in 2025, competition is fierce, algorithms are smarter, and consumers are bouncing around between platforms before making a move.

So, is blogging dead? Not even close. It’s just playing a new role.

Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane to see how blogging and digital marketing came to be and why they’re still relevant today.

The 2000s: The Early Days of Blogging and SEO Goldmines

In the early 2000s, blogging was like rocking up to a nearly empty street, whipping out a megaphone and shouting out to anyone in earshot. There weren’t many people around, but anyone who showed up got heard. With such little competition, a well-optimized blog could rank in Google fairly effortlessly and drive thousands of visitors to your website.

Businesses could even monetize blogs, even back then. In fact, monetization occurred as early as 2003 with BlogAds, arguably the precursor to Google AdSense.

But, as with all things that actually work, businesses soon caught on. Those who invested in blogging saw huge returns, and a solid blog could single-handedly fuel brand awareness and generate real organic sales.

No paid ads, no complex funnels, just good quality content and strong SEO (even if we didn’t really understand what SEO was).

Yes, blogging was not only a marketing tool; it was the only marketing tool that really mattered. But then, social media arrived.

The 2010s: Social Media Disrupts Everything

The 2010s changed everything. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram utterly exploded in popularity and stole the attention away from traditional blogs.

People were still searching on Google, but they were also scrolling, sharing, and consuming bite-sized content on social media.

Smart brands saw the writing on the wall and used their long-form content, storytelling, and new-found expertise to provide the things social media couldn’t.

Blogs became a sort of “home base” where brands could deep-dive into topics, and social media posts became the vehicle through which traffic was directed.

It worked well, for a while. But today, even that strategy isn’t enough.

2025: Blogging as a Relationship-Building Tool

Here we are in 2025, and blogging is still alive and kicking, only now it’s no longer just about traffic, but trust. Every day, 7.5 million blog posts are published. That’s like the entire population of Hong Kong hitting the publish button on a daily basis, and Google has to catalog it all.

With so many posts, needless to say, simply ranking on Google won’t cut it anymore. Instead, blogs have become engagement hubs—places where brands educate, mature, and build loyalty with their audience.

The numbers back this up:

Businesses with a blog receive 55% more website visitors than those without.
Companies maintaining active blogs generate 67% more leads per month.

(Source: Oberlo)

So, given all these intricacies, the dominance of social media, and the sheer number of blogs out there, why do they still work? Blogs give brands a voice, credibility, and a way to stay top-of-mind.

The brands winning in 2025 aren’t just writing for the clicks. They are creating blogs that:

Answer real questions.
Provide unique insights that AI can then pull from for user prompts.
Keep audiences engaged through email and social distribution.

In short, if you’re using your blog as just a content dump or creating content no one will realistically want to consume, you’re not building any trust. Play the game right, and your blog will not only attract visitors but also turn them into long-term customers.

Why Attribution Is Still Broken (and What to Do About It)

Ever taken a good look through your marketing analytics and asked yourself the quiet question, “Wait, which marketing effort actually got that sale?” Trust me when I say you’re not alone in this. Tracking customer journeys nowadays is very complicated.

The days where you could simply slap a “conversion” label on a single touchpoint have gone out the window. Today’s buyers are zigzagging their way through multiple platforms before they come to that all important decision to buy. They’re watching videos, reading reviews, searching for you on social media, and even asking ChatGPT.

And yet, most marketing attribution models are still stuck in the 2000s. Let’s break down where they fail and what to do about it.

The Old Way: Single-Touch Attribution

Back in the day, marketing attribution was super simple. You could either credit the first touch (where the customer first discovered you) or the last touch (where they finally converted).

First-touch attribution: “They found us through a blog post, so blogging gets the credit!”
Last-touch attribution: “They clicked an Instagram ad and bought it, so Instagram gets the credit!”

It all sounds so neat and tidy, case closed. Only it’s not. It’s actually wildly inaccurate.

These models completely ignore the journey in between. What if a customer found your site on Google, read a few blog posts, watched your YouTube video, then got retargeted through an email. Then they later clicked on an ad they saw before converting? Should that ad really get the credit? Probably not.

The New Reality: Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)

Enter multi-touch attribution (MTA). This is a model that spreads the credit across multiple interactions in the buyer’s journey.

For example:

A Google search for a hair dryer over a lunch break: This finds a blog post on your website.
The customer reads more of your content while having a coffee: They are engaging with your expertise.
Instagram ad: They’re off their lunch break but later at home while doom scrolling an ad pops up for your product and they’re reminded they need to keep reading. They subscribe to your blog’s newsletter.
Email newsletter: A final nudge from your campaign offering a 12% discount on hair care appliances.
Direct visit: They decided to jump on your site and buy the hair dryer.

This approach doesn’t just give all the credit to the discount offered in the newsletter or even the blog post itself. MTA assigns value to each and every step. It’s a huge improvement over single-touch, but it’s still far from perfect.

Why Multi-Touch Attribution Still Fails

Sorry to be the breaker of bad news, but MTA still has some massive blind spots:

The dark funnel problem: Analytics can’t track word-of-mouth referrals, a private recommendation over WhatsApp, or a few colleagues at work talking over Slack.

AI search: If someone found out about your product during a late-night session with ChatGPT or DeepSeek, how would you ever know it happened?

External influence: What if your competitor has a flash sale or a TikTok influencer makes a viral post featuring your product? No attribution model can account for these events; you have no insight here.

So, what’s the solution?

Ask your customers how they figured out you exist with a post-purchase survey.
Combine multiple tracking tools like Google Analytics, UTM tags (great for AI search), and social analytics.
Choose to accept that sometimes you just can’t keep tabs on everything. Instead focus on creating valuable touchpoints instead of chasing the “perfect” attribution model.

Attribution is never going to hit 100% accuracy, but understanding how these gaps account for success makes you a smart marketer.

The 2025 Marketing Playbook: Omnipresence (Without Burnout)

If you’ve been told you need to be “everywhere, all at once” online, take a deep breath, you don’t. The idea that brands need to dominate every single platform is one of the biggest marketing myths of the digital age.

What Omnipresence Actually Means

Being omnipresent doesn’t mean blasting your content across every channel possible, like an emergency broadcast. That’s a surefire route to burnout. Instead, the smartest brands in 2025 are strategically present where their audience already spends their time.

For some that might mean Google + LinkedIn, for others, it’s Instagram + email marketing. The key here is to choose the right platform, showing up consistently, and making every single interaction count.

Trying to be everywhere at once means you spread your resources way too thin. Instead, focus on being discoverable (SEO), engaging (social), and retaining (email). Nail those three, and you will be present where it actually matters.

Step 1: SEO

Even in 2025, Google is still the king of discovery, but now you can also add the web search capabilities of generative AI to the mix. Tools like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Perplexity pull much of their information straight off of search engine data, so that means if your content is optimized for search, you’re invisible across both fronts.

Tactic: Invest in SEO-friendly content and the occasional press release to get visibility in AI-generated responses. We outline this approach in detail across our G.E.O.D.A.T.A framework articles.

Step 2: Social

Social media is the new discovery engine, with 61% of consumers discovering new products on Instagram alone. Does that mean you need to be on every single one of them? No.

Tactic: Instead of trying to master TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube all at once, pick just one or two that align with your audience. If your customers are B2B pros, use LinkedIn. If you sell lifestyle products, Instagram is perfect. If you’re a financial institution, YouTube works wonders.

A strong presence on one well-managed platform beats a scattered presence across give every single time.

Step 3: Email

Social gets you noticed, but email keeps you remembered. In fact, 59% of consumers say that marketing has a significant effect on their purchase influence.

Unlike social media, where you’re at the mercy of algorithms, your email list is yours to keep forever. That’s why all the winning brands are still using it in 2025.

Tactic: Capture every single email address you can. Get them through blog CTAs and social bios, and create irresistible lead magnets. Then, nurture those leads with a steady feed of personalized, valuable, and engaging content. That way, when those customers are ready to buy, you’ll be right there, top of mind.

How Many Interactions Does It Really Take to Make a Sale?

If you’ve ever heard of the old marketing “Rule of 7” (the idea that a customer needs to see your brand at least seven times before they commit to a purchase), it’s time to forget it. That rule was made for an era when people had to get up off the couch to mute their TV and still read newspapers.

Rule of 7? More like 20+ Touchpoints

It’s 2025, and most people don’t make snap decisions anymore. Instead, they willingly enter a maze of interactions before finally settling on a purchase. And the number of touchpoints they went through to get there? Well, it’s a lot higher than seven.

Warm leads: These are people who already know and like your brand, but even they need 5-12 touchpoints before they trust you enough to type in their credit card number.
Cold prospects: Well, they’re called cold for a reason. These potentials need 20 – 50 touches before calling a decision.
Inactive customers: Breathe a sigh of relief. Typically, they only need 1 – 3.

Your brand needs to be seen, heard, remembered, and trusted across multiple channels. If someone discovers you first on Google with a search but then sees you again pop up on LinkedIn, they’re more likely to follow the trail and become a customer.

How to Speed up the Buyer Journey

If you wait for those 50 touchpoints to happen organically, you probably won’t be selling much in the near future. You need to give the process a gentle nudge:

Use remarketing ads: Most visitors won’t buy on their first visit, so retarget them on Google, Facebook, and Instagram as a gentle reminder.
Offer micro-commitments: Free trials, lead magnets, a newsletter—anything to nurture the lead and keep them engaged.
Keep the message consistent: If your website, ads, and social content all tell the same clear story, then people are going to recognize you fast, and remember you.

The brands that win the marketing races of 2025 aren’t just going to pop up once or twice. They’re going to strategically plant themselves in front of their audience until the time is just right.

The 3-Part Marketing Formula for 2025

The one magic marketing trick doesn’t exist anymore, so 2025 is the year when you should stop chasing it. Instead, focus on playing a long game with a strategy that actually works. That means concentrating on the three core pillars we already discussed:

Engaging blog content: Think of blogging as more than just luring traffic to your site. It has to be valuable and engaging. Use it to build trust, authority, and brand loyalty.
Smart tracking: Multi-touch attribution helps, and you should use it. Just understand that it’s not perfect, know its blind spots, get surveys out there, and track what you can.
Use strategic omnipresence: You absolutely don’t need to be everywhere all at once on a biblical scale. Just be present where it matters. Remember: SEO, social, email.

Master these three, and you will no longer be chasing down customers. You’ll be attracting them.

Want more insights like these? Subscribe to our YouTube channel for expert strategies that actually move the needle.