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Zero Click Marketing is a marketing strategy podcast about content marketing, audience research, and how brands grow when clicks matter less. Hosted by Amanda Natividad, Chief Evangelist at SparkToro, the show explores how marketers reach audiences, build influence, and earn attention in a zero-click internet. New to the show? Start with Episode 2: What Zero Click Marketing Actually Is.
[00:00:00] Amanda Natividad: For years, marketers were taught to win one way, and pretty soon, I know I'm going to be cringing at this because I used to teach it myself. It's to create the ultimate guide, make it comprehensive, cover every single subtopic, anticipate every question, be the one page that has everything about that topic.
And that advice made a lot of sense back when the job was to rank, earn the click, and keep people on your site. But that era might be ending.
I'm Amanda Natividad and welcome to Zero Click Marketing.
[00:00:44] Amanda Natividad: Two recent studies caught my attention. They look at totally different systems, Google and Chat, GPT, but they point in the same direction.
Broad catchall content is getting weaker, and focused, hard-to-replace value, is getting stronger. Let's start with Google. So my friend Cyrus Shepherd, analyzed over 400 websites to figure out what actually predicts traffic growth. He found the biggest winning websites had at least one, though ideally, all five of these features: They offer a product or service, someone can actually complete a task on the site, they have proprietary assets, they're tightly focused on a niche, they are a strong brand.
In other words, Google's winners aren't just good content, they're useful destinations. And the more of those traits a site had, the more likely it was to win. Sites with none of them? About a 13% win rate. Sites with four or five of those features? Closer to 70%.
Let's get into more detail on what a winning and losing website looks like. So Cyrus names birdie.com as a losing example, and that kind of makes sense. I mean, birdie has a lot of polished content. It's really good content. It covers fashion and beauty products, but in Cyrus's framework, it doesn't actually offer its own product, and it doesn't let the user complete a task.
You can read about the thing, but you can't really do the thing there. Now, this is my own example. Why would you go to Birdie when you could instead go to Derm Store, where you can read about the products and click over to buy those products directly?
Tech Target is a different kind of loser. It's niche, it's well-known, but Cyrus points out that most of its traffic actually comes from long tail keywords. Not people actively looking for Tech Target itself. So it has recognition, but it doesn't have enough destination demand.
Then there's Mental Floss, which shows up as a winner, and this is the brand lesson. People search for Mental Floss. They're not just searching for generic trivia questions and stumbling into it. They're seeking out the site by name. Maybe this is even a lesson for Birdie too. While Mental Floss has been around longer, and they're a clearer brand now known for their quirky educational content, especially because they were probably the first ones to do it, or at least they think they were.
Now all of this explains the difference between content people find and a brand People remember. Which is why this research is bigger than SEO. It's not just asking, did we publish a good article? It's asking are we building something people actually come back for? Now, let's look at ChatGPT, obviously a totally different system.
So my friend Kevin Indig and the Air Ops team studied what actually gets cited in ChatGPT responses.The strongest signal they found wasn't authority. It wasn't back links, it was relevance. Specifically, how closely a page's headings matched the original query. Pages that covered some of the related subtopics, about 26 to 50%, actually outperformed pages that tried to cover everything, so their conclusion was pretty blunt. A page that nails one question beats a page that kind of answers five. So now we've got two signals from Google: Win by being hard to replace. From ChatGPT, win by being tightly matched to the question. Put those together, and you can start to see a pattern. The winning site, or maybe brand, needs to be worth seeking out.
Cyrus's research points to defensibility, things that Google cannot easily disintermediate, like products, tools, data, brand, things you can't just summarize away. And then the Air Ops research is pointing to defensibility by way of clarity and focus. We spent years teaching marketers to be the most comprehensive, but these systems are rewarding something else: The most relevant answer from the least replaceable source.
So what should you actually do with all this? Well, I can't say this definitively, but I can say, here's how I'm thinking about it now. Build more pages that answer one clear question well. Clear, focused intentional pages. Treat ultimate guides as hubs, not your default. So they can still have a place, especially if you've already built out the content.
But even then, are those ultimate guides directly relevant to your brand? Invest in things that create real utility that people need to keep coming back for. Tools, or well, at least tools that Google doesn't make. I would say probably don't go building a weather website right now.
Data, research workflows, right? Those are things that are really hard to replace. And finally, build a brand people actually seek out. Because if people remember you, trust you and look for you on purpose, you're a lot less vulnerable to whatever platform decides to answer the question for them.
Now, if you've thought of another takeaway or a strategy pivot from all of this, I would love to hear from you. So you can send me a note or you know what? Feel free to send me hate mail to my work account, amanda@sparktoro.com. That's that, friends, I'll talk to you next week.