According to this article on the Neil Patel blog, over 60% of Google searches produce no clicks. What’s going on?
The author makes a couple of initial observations. One is that the trend is upwards; and the other is that the data does not take into account the increasing number of voice searches, which would make the ‘no-click’ figure even higher. It’s possible of course that people are making a lot of searches where the results really aren’t what they want. I doubt it though. A more likely culprit must be the number of searches for simple information that Google then provides directly, such as if you search for ‘what time is it in beijing‘.
For most of our commercial sales-related searches, this is irrelevant. However, it does mean that people are getting more used to getting what they want from Google at a glance, whether it involves a click or not. Being at the top of the results, whether it’s the ‘natural’ search position or – more likely – an advert, is likely to become increasingly important.