The SEO world has been buzzing about Featured Snippets for a while now. I’ve written at length about Featured Snippets and I’ve developed strategies for many of my clients, helping them achieve “Position Zero” for high-traffic terms.
Many rightly see Featured Snippets as an opportunity. After all, optimizing for Featured Snippets also means you are optimizing for voice search, as this is where most voice search answers are sourced from.
But innovations like Featured Snippets, along with knowledge panels, maps, videos, and other elements that now appear on results pages have eliminated the need for many searchers to click through to the website hosting the original content. This phenomenon has been termed the “no-click search” and according to several studies, it has seen a dramatic increase over the past few years.
According to research by Jumpshot commissioned by Sparktoro, in Q1 of 2019 almost 49% of Google searches were resolved without a click, meaning the searcher found the answer they were looking for within Google and never had to click through to another website.
On the surface, this looks like bad news for website owners. The truth is a little more complicated, but it is certain that for many searches Google wants to provide as much information as possible within the search result. For companies who invest time and money to create content in order to attract clicks, the rise of no-click searches will seem like an incredibly frustrating phenomenon.

Clicks Mean Money!
Click-Through Rate is an important metric because it assists you understand your customers—it tells you what works (and what doesn’t work) when trying to reach your target audience. A low CTR could indicate that you’re targeting the wrong audience or that you’re not speaking their language persuasively enough to convince them to click.