Tag Archives: SEO

The Zero Click Web

I wonder how many of you have noticed a subtle change in the way that you navigate the web? We’re in the midst of a transition to the zero click Internet, meaning users no longer have to click on links to reach web sites to find content. Instead, big platforms are trying to supply the content people want to keep them from leaving the platform.

The example of this that most of you have encountered is Google search. When you now ask a question on Google, the first thing offered is a short answer to your question. Google has been scraping the web and responding with answers to some questions for a few years. But after Google introduced AI it now provides fairly robust response to questions.

I expect the average person is happy with most of Google answers, so they don’t click through to the web site where the answer was generated. If you are looking for a fact, the Google response is really useful. For instance, if you ask for the number of consecutive games played by Cal Ripken, Google tells you it is 2,632 games. If I don’t want any additional color for that answer, the Google response is perfect.

However, the Google response is not adequate if you ask a more complex question. I asked about the outlook for interest rates in 2025 and got the following response, “Fixed income markets anticipate that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in 2025, but not by much. Short-term interest rates are expected to end 2025 close to 4%.” I don’t know about you, but I am not going to trust Google to boil down opinions from different economist and bankers into a single opinion and a few sentences. When I asked that question, I was already prepared to read to multiple articles to get different opinions on the topic.

I find this to be a dangerous trend because many folks will take the Google response as the answer. If somebody is thinking of buying a house and using a variable-rate mortgage, they might want to know if some subset of economists are predicting a big boost in interest rates. Accepting Google’s short answer is easy, but it is not the answer. Google clearly seems to be quoting a single source, and it doesn’t even tell you who that is.

Google is not the only one doing this. Social media sites like Facebook and X started to discourage external links a few years ago so that people wouldn’t leave their platforms. When news is posted on social media it is often now a text blurb only with no link to the source.

There are several consequences of the zero click Internet. As I’ve pointed out, a lot of complex information is getting boiled down to short answers, and many folks are not digging any deeper. In a world full of disinformation, that’s a bad trend.

This also means that fewer people are reading articles and blogs, and that means a gradual diminishment of digital publishing. As AI is used to write short blurbs, even big publishers like magazines and newspapers will wane in influence, because people will be reading short summaries of articles but not the actual articles.

Perhaps the biggest change from the zero click Internet will be the death of the traditional web advertising model that measures success through clicks. When folks aren’t clicking through to web sites, advertising will have to be done and compensated in a different way. I have to imagine the current Google AI has already caused major havoc with SEO consultants who help companies attract more web traffic. Over time, domain names will become less important as people get the summary version and don’t visit websites.

Getting the Biggest Bang from Your Web Presence

GooglelogoSearch Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of getting your web presence noticed by web search engines. There are two ways to get noticed – buy your way to the top of a search or else maximize SEO if you don’t pay. Google will move anybody to the head of the search results if they are willing to pay for the privilege since that is one their major sources of revenue. For example, if you start typing in the word ‘American’ into Google, by the time you have typed the first three letters ‘American Airlines’ will be at the top of the search results.

But hopefully your company website, blog or other web pages don’t share a name that is similar to one of the big companies that are willing to spend the money to be first. SEO is about the steps you can take to make sure that non-pay web content can get noticed.

Every search engines is a bit different in how they rank web content in the search process, and those definitions change all of the time as the search engines tweak their algorithms. But there are enough similarities that SEO is able to make some decent generalizations about those steps you can take to improve the ranking of a web page.

In writing this article I took a look at how my own company, CCG Consulting, is ranked in a Google search. As it turns out, there are a whole lot of companies with the name CCG and even a number of them who are also consultants. There is CCG in a number of different fields such as engineering, networking, banking and cardiac research – there is even another CCG Consulting in the telecom field that specializes in helping MDUs and similar properties with telecom issues.

Because there are a lot of similarly named firms, and none that have paid to be at the top of the list, it is hard for any firm named CCG to get noticed. This blog you are reading appears in the middle of the first page of the Google search but my web site doesn’t appear until the third page of the Google search results.

This makes sense to me when you consider the way search engines do their rankings. One of the best ways to understand SEO is through something clever called the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. This shows the various factors that influence a search result and also ranks those factors by influence, from strongly positive to strongly negative.

Things like quality of content, use of keywords, the ability of a search engine to ‘crawl’ or read the page all are factors that have a strong influence on the ranking in Google. And there are also things that lower a search engine ranking such as having hidden pages that only a search engine can see but not humans, or buying links to try to improve your ranking.

I am not disappointed in the rankings for my web site because I don’t count on people finding me through a Google search. I maintain a web site mostly as a way for others to verify that our company exists and I don’t count on it as much of a marketing tool. Also, if somebody already knows me and searches for CCG Consulting and also types in the world telecom, half of the first page of search results are about my firm. Since I work in a very specialized market I know that a lot of my targeted potential clients already know about me from other sources such as this blog or Linked-In.

But these search results matter a whole lot to any company selling products to people that they don’t know. Let’s consider the example of a competitive carrier that sells the triple play services in Akron, Ohio. One would hope that when somebody searches Google for ‘Internet’ and ‘Akron’ or ‘cable TV’ and ‘Akron’ that this company would appear high on the search results. This is important because this kind of search is how a potential customer moving to that market might find their new ISP. If this carrier wants to be considered by new customers then they need to understand the way that search engines work. Otherwise they will miss out on the opportunity to sell to new customers.

It’s easy to find ways to communicate with people who already know you or who are already your customers. But it’s important to also think about how people who don’t know you are going to find out about you. I know that companies use things like billboards and newspaper in the hope of getting noticed and for building brand awareness. But I also recommend that you go to Google and Bing today and search for your company in the same way somebody who doesn’t know you would do. Don’t search by your company name, but rather by your products and market.

If your company pops up near the top of the first page then you are in good shape. But if you don’t, then consider what this means. If you want customers to find you on search engines you have to learn more about SEO. You might even consider buying priority at the search engines. I have several clients who have told me that they never seem to get business from people who are just moving to town, and not having web pages that get noticed is probably one of the reasons why.