Zero Click SEO’s impact on Mobile Analytics — Cindy Crumb // Mobile Moxie

Quotes

• “The rise of zero clicks in mobile analytics is making it less accurate or less useful and thats unfortunate for the analysts because they want us to live and die by the numbers and the analytics. But the reality is, as SEOs we are ultimately marketers and while we need to look at the analytics, we also need to understand things that are hard to quantify like brand reach, exposure, awareness, and affinity.” -Cindy

• “Paraphrasing what youre saying, I think wecant only consider SEO to be a direct-response channel. If youre not getting a click, you cannot necessarily say, impression to click to conversion, heres how I am attributing value.” -Ben

• “What that means is to understand the true impact of SEO, wedo need to start thinking about evaluating brand metrics, reach, impressions, and affinity.” -Ben

• “There are a lot of factors that go into query than many people realize. What I encourage people to do is to look at bill search results that have all thesame information that a real user might.” -Cindy

• “Most analytics platforms cannot do this. They are aggregating but in that aggregation, you are losing a lot of details that can clarify what is really going on. Things like, language, location, and a device can change the way a result looks and even what ranks in a mobile search.” -Cindy

• “Location can change the query results even if it doesnt seem to have local intent. The difference between iOS and Android devices is especially prominent for apps aswell as for large and small phone screens.” -Cindy

• “I think in an ideal world as we start moving towards more brand evaluation metrics, understanding the user state, and a lot of that has to do with the device they are on, where in the world they are, gives you a sense of what they are actually trying to accomplish.” -Ben

• “With the increase of no-click searches or what I call hosted inclusion which is Google stuff jumping in the search result often above you but not counted in analytics and not counted especially in Search Console. Anything that Google hosts or will put above you in position zero, those things are often more interactive than a regular blue-winged kind of search result would be.” -Cindy

• “Just because you are ranking number one anymore doesnt mean that you are above the fold especially in a mobile scenario where knowledge graph is always pushed into position one instead of tossed into the side like it is on desktop and maps are pushed above you, in mobile.” -Cindy

• “To me, one of the major metrics I would be looking at is, even when Im ranking in position one is, am I actually above the fold, the actual visibility instead of just whether the impression is being served.” -Ben

• “I think a lot about, what would I do if I were Google and what is in my best interest vs what is Googles best interest.” -Cindy

• “As SEOs, a lot of us think of Search Console as a single source of truth but that is actually Google reporting on themselves. We use that heavily as a place for Googles assessment of how we are doing. There is so much happening in the search results that are not being shown in Search Console.” -Cindy

• “The map is not the terrain and so if we think of an analytics platform as a map, which is to say that it is an abstraction of reality, its not actual reality. It is an aggregate and it glosses over the details and in a lot of ways, the details are whats important to us, SEOs because its the details that we are fighting against and we have to overcome or its the details that are keeping us from getting the traffic that we want.” -Cindy

• “What is included in the Search Console is not an accident and whats excluded is not an accident. That is how I think about it and I think it is not in Googles best interest to give us some of these things that smart SEOs desperately need.” -Cindy