235: Your Website Is Your Source Of Truth, Not Your Traffic Source with Amanda Natividad, Co-Author of Zero Click Marketing

0:00Your website is your source of truth. You're not going to spend all your time there. You're probably not even going to update it once a week. But that is your source of truth. That is the record. Everything else just points to it. That was Amanda Natividad, the person who named Zero Click Marketing. And now her book that she co-wrote with Rand Fishkin called Zero Click Marketing is out. I wanted to ask her one thing. If nobody is clicking, what is your website for? She came with examples. She bought clothes she found through ChatGPT without needing to see the brand's homepage. She signed up for a tool whose homepage by her own account would have put her off.

0:43And she still thinks your website matters more than ever. This is NoHacksWithMe, Sunny. Nobody asked any of us if we wanted to see the internet change so much. so I check what AI is actually doing to it, the good, the bad, and the pointless. Amanda, welcome to NoHacks. A huge pleasure to have you on and talk about zero-click marketing. Yeah, happy to be here, Sunny. Let's do it. Let's do it. So a few days ago, you wrote about this on your LinkedIn. You wanted to buy a clothing item, but you didn't want to do a traditional Google search buying journey. Can you explain why? Yeah. So over the past year, year and a half, I've gotten more into the idea of, you know what, just trying to reduce microplastics in my environment.

1:32I've been trying to purge my wardrobe a little bit and shop less. Right. But if I do buy something new, I do want it to be made from natural fibers whenever possible. and one thing I realized that I didn't have that I felt I needed was just really comfortable loungewear. My existing loungewear was just random hand-me-downs and swag over the years. So I figured, you know what, I can buy some cotton pants. That's okay. And, you know, I didn't want to buy from like, I definitely didn't want to buy from like Temu or Amazon, right? I wanted to buy just, you know, like a reasonably priced cotton brand, right?

2:14And I didn't want to search for it in Google because I already had the distrust, right? I already thought if I search for it here, I'm just going to get a bunch of brands who bid on the keywords like cotton, organic, sustainable, right? Like I want an actual brand that sells the thing that I'm looking for. And so I ended up asking ChatGPT to find like three to five brands that focus on manufacturing clothes that are made of natural fibers. And PACT, P-A-C-T, was one of the ones that came up. And so I went to the website, immediately saw everything was pretty reasonably priced. All of it, or at least the vast majority of it is made from organic cotton.

3:00My clothes don't have to be organic, but natural fibers, right? So I was like, great. These pants are only$30 or$40. That's not too bad. I bought them right away, right? So that I think is, I think that's an interesting case study in of itself of how people are discovering things, right? And in my case, it was, I knew exactly what my pain point was what I wanted to buy. Like I knew what solution I wanted. And so I was very fast to convert. And I don't think I'm alone in this, right? You're not. I mean, the primed user that is arriving to the website ready to buy, convert, do whatever. And that is so different compared to those boring ads or even Google search.

3:47When you see a list of 10 results and which door should I knock? Like what's behind it? using this kind of discovery slash research, you land on a website and you already know what they have. It's just a matter of, do I want to buy from them or not? So in a way, the entire website is on a checkout page in that journey. That's interesting. That the entire website is... It's transactional. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And I think the funny thing too is that I didn't need their homepage or I didn't need that full experience to convert. I needed the couple quick details of, oh, this, this, this. Yes. Got it.

4:30I do have another example, which I think is kind of interesting. But I do want to ask you first, what was the last thing you bought? The last new thing that you bought? And how did you get that purchase? People are making fun of me already because every time I talk at a conference or a webinar. I had a webinar two days ago. It's always running shoes. It's always running shoes. And I was doing the same research. That's the thing I have in my conference talk and in the webinar I did. Doing research through Cloud or through any LLM and the information that's not passing through because it's not loaded properly.

5:07I'm more of a technical website optimization person because they didn't use JavaScript to load what the shoe drop is, what the weight is, availability all this stuff so it's my answer is always going to be running shoes for buying stuff online absolutely because you get better deals that way it's true so do you have do you buy the same shoe over and over again no no oh you get a different one oh no no no it's always something else because uh the shoe tube or youtube for shoe reviewers or the entire that entire sub segment it's a magical place you watch the videos you decide what you want you ask chat gpt you read do reviews online, you go to Reddit.

5:46You know how the journey goes. I mean, you called it pinball in the book. And I think that's a disservice to pinballs because they're not that messy. Like a pinball is a wonderful structural place compared to user journeys online. That's hell. And we have no idea what's happening when people are buying from us. So I think similar to you, yes, you go to the website ready to buy or ready to be disappointed and go somewhere else. But it's not like, oh, I need to see what they have. I need to see what this brand is about. And that is so different compared to the last 30 years of doing things online.

6:24Oh, the other example I wanted to bring up, this is interesting, because this was entirely driven by the AI tool. So I was building the zero click marketing.co website. Well, I was working with Claude. Claude helped me vibe code it. By the way, I'm okay with that in the sense that it is essentially a static website, right? I'm not passing private information through it. It's just a plain website. No one's judging. No one's judging. For that kind of website, no one's judging. Right, for that kind of website. And it's also just me. I'm the only one running it. Anyway, so I'm making the website and I realized, oh, I want to include a contact page.

7:01So which means I want to embed a nice contact form. And sure, like, you know, there were a couple of existing um like websites or brands that i knew of but i knew those all require you to include that the the that company's branding and i was like i don't i don't want that but at the same time i don't know if i want to pay for this yet because i'm not i know that i'm not going to get a high volume of contacts right so it's a little bit of like i'm gonna get like 10 a month i don't feel like that's worth paying money for and i'm sure there's a service that will provide that. So I asked Claude, I was like, look, here's what I want.

7:40I want a free tool, or at least there's a free option. I also want it to be something simple that will just go to my email inbox and that we can reskin in the look of the zero click marketing branding. And so Claude said, great, you should use formspree.io. Right. And I was like, okay. I was like, well, is it easy to use? Right. Like I don't, I don't, I'm not really good at coding. Is it, can I actually use it? And it was like, yep. All you need is this like ID number. We'll embed it right in the code. I have the page ready. All you have to do is make an account. So I thought, great. I think it even gave me the product page to go to.

8:20So I just clicked on that, went directly to that product or checkout page, transacted, got my code, put it in. Perfect. right it works beautifully if you go to zero click marketing.co contact it just looks like my website right and it works just as expected love it and it was only i think i told a friend you know what happened actually i talked about this on at the microconf event right it's for you know, SaaS, indie founders, and it came up in Q &A. And the Form Spree founder, a co-founder was there. And he said, did you go to our homepage? And I sat there. I was like, you know what? No. I've been a very happy user, probably going to become a paying customer soon for like two to three months now.

9:13I'm like, I've never seen your homepage. He showed it to me. And it is very dev focused. It's like. Yes, it is. It's very dev-focused. It's like, you know, for any programmer, for every developer. And I was like, wow, if I went to your homepage first, I never would have become a customer because I don't code. That's not my world. I would just be like, oh, this looks too hard for me. I'm just a marketer. But it ended up. That last part is so interesting, though. I never thought about it. By the way, nohacks.co slash contact, Formsprey as well, discovered the same way. Yes. It's the best. I mean, I had heard of them before, but they're incredible.

9:53Absolutely. The thing you said there, the design of the website is not, it looks dev-oriented. And yes, this is a dev-oriented, in the past, this was a dev-oriented product. Now anybody can implement it easily like you did. I never thought of that. And I think that's the interesting part because one of the things I love to talk about and think about is the visual layer of the website and what does it mean now compared to what meant the best. And I always say I love designers. I have a lot of designer friends. I'm not saying they should not have a job. They should. We need good design everywhere, not just on websites.

10:31But that visual layer of a website, which is what we used to start with when building websites, is now the last thing that needs to be put on, on the structure. And if you want it to be discovered through an LLM or even Google. The visual layer is less and less important. That's my opinion, but I'm almost ready to die on that hill. That's an interesting point of view. Because, is this because also, or is this opinion also informed by the idea that fewer and fewer people are actually going to your website and spending time there and trying to, yeah. By the time they see the visual layer, they already have an opinion.

11:17That's right. Yeah. I mean, exactly what you described there. You would not sign up for Formspreet if it was, hey, there's a link. Go there and sign up. Yeah. This made it easy. Like, this is exactly what I need. Maybe they're not communicating in a way that I would understand, but this is the product for me. So I think that is changing so much. That's changing the whole dynamic online. It is. But that's a good example. I love that example. especially because it happened to me exactly the same way. Exactly the same way. Yeah. We should send this episode to the forum spree people. I'm sure, I hope they would like it.

11:53Let's talk about the website. If the website is, like if the clicks are not there in the zero click era, zero click marketing era, what exactly is the role of a website? Oh. You know, what's funny is I actually feel like it is more important than ever to have your own website. You know, I think people might be thinking, well, you know, if nobody clicks, what's the point? That might be the, you know, the naysayer side, oversimplified naysayer side. But it's more important than ever because it is truly the only channel that you 100 % own. It is your website, right? You are the one putting the content there.

12:37You maintain it. You have full control over it. And it just matters differently than it used to. Like, yes, I think that the tried and true SEO content marketing strategy of finding high volume keywords, low competition, creating content, ranking, growing traffic, it doesn't work the way it used to, right? It used to be pretty predictable by how much you could grow your website. Not so much the case anymore. but now your website is still being accessed right it's just that it's more likely to be accessed or i think it's more likely to be accessed by a search and ai tools the ones that are finding information crawling the web extracting it and putting it into their platforms so if you have your website where you fully own your message right the systems will crawl that and as people query these systems to find their answers, that's part of how you show up there.

13:40Nothing to disagree with there. I fully agree with that take. I just told you design doesn't matter, which is kind of a similar way to say what you described there. It matters, but after all these other things. Yeah. In that way. You're saying everyone should have a website. Is that different compared to 15 years ago when also everyone needed to have a website, but most people didn't? Like, why is it now different? Oh, I love that question. I think it's different now because of the way people use the web, because of the way the systems use the web, because of the fact that it is increasingly more and more the only place you own.

14:21You know, like, that kind of just becomes your last castle, so to speak, right? And it's, you know what, if you're not getting like thousands of views to your website, it's not really the point. The point is like that's your castle. That's yours. And no one else can control that. You know, so it's even just when it comes to, you know, your social media profiles, right? people it's popular to just to put your link in the bio but it's also popular to have a link tree or something similar that guides people where you can show in the interface all your different links I'm even gonna say like no it's even more important to put that on your website like I would rather go to your to someone's crappy website that just has a page of links and it just says in text this is the link to my blog this is the link to my youtube channel like that i want that right and this is not nostalgia this is not nostalgia speaking this is this is how i feel as well this is this is how it should be absolutely yes and the systems are gonna find it anyway obviously you know assuming your website is set up correctly which is not difficult to do it it's super easy now let's be honest anyone can set up a website and it costs what twenty a year to have a domain and you can host it on cloudflare for free or whatever you want it's super easy i'll quote something from uh this is a podcast episode you did with another former guest will reynolds uh check out that episode both episodes actually not just my episode first somebody has to care for somebody to show up and do to all that how do you influence that caring?

16:11And does websites do the influence? Is it third-party services? How do you work on that? How do you get people to care enough to go on that journey where you are the solution in the end? How do you get people to care? I mean, everybody has problems, right? And your goal, everyone has problems. Let's sit with that. No, but as a marketer, it's your job to find the people who have the problem that you're solving. Right. So in that sense, it's simple. Right. They already have the problem. How do you get them to care? Well, that comes through audience and customer research. Right. Understanding what drives those pain points.

16:59What are the fears behind them? Are they, is the big objection they have to purchasing from your brand the fact that you don't have front and center that your clothes are made from natural materials? You know, if that's the problem you're solving, put that front and center, right? People will, the right people will care about that. And then what I'm talking about, like, where do you do, where do you get people to care? It's unfortunately everywhere, right? It's all the places in which your audience shows up. And yeah, this is where the audience research comes into play because it's not just, oh, go to every single social network and have a presence there.

17:40It's no, go to the social networks where your audience already hangs out, but also where they might also be receptive to your problem. Right. Because it's not enough to say like, I think Facebook, right, is probably the most popular social network in terms of users. Highly popular. Okay. Okay. No, in terms of like how many accounts created. I know what you meant. But it doesn't mean you should do all your marketing there, right? Absolutely. Is your audience receptive to your message there? No. In the case of B2B, that might be or that is most likely LinkedIn. Okay, so go on LinkedIn, right? But then maybe the other layer to this is do you as a marketer or like as your team, do you want to spend time there are you capable are you competent and I'm saying this as it's a little bit of a light luxury or privilege right because some teams might not have a choice they have to be on YouTube because they have to be on YouTube but if you do have a choice it's do you have the resources willingness I don't know charisma to be on YouTube or is the path of least resistance just doing text-based or starting with just text-based posts on LinkedIn.

19:00You know, so I do kind of push people to choose the platform where you already have a little bit more competency because you're going to have to create there maybe what three to five times per week. It doesn't have to be every day. So if you're there several times a week, if you're absolutely miserable and incompetent on that platform, it's not going to go well. That is absolutely true. Yes. Yes. One of my pet peeves is people going for the default option that's recommended to them without even checking that default option. For example, you mentioned LinkedIn. And yes, LinkedIn is usually for B2B.

19:43I mean, mostly because there's nothing else, if we're being very honest. but you need to check if that really is what you should be doing. Like if someone tells you, yeah, all the business stuff is on LinkedIn, but maybe there's a YouTube, like I said, maybe you have a charisma, all that. Just research, don't go for the default because defaults rarely work for everyone. You're right because a default tends to be just the average. And we have LLMs for that. Yeah, that's true. That's absolutely true. In the case of YouTube, right? I mean, YouTube is also a really, really good B2B channel. And especially if you're in the market of being able to educate your audience, that's exactly where they would go.

20:26Or at least I think. There's one thing that you did an experiment with. How did you hear about us drop down? So the example you're bringing up, Sunny, it's in the Zero Click Marketing book. I believe it is chapter 23. So there's a lot of talk about, well, you should just include in your dropdown or somewhere in your post-purchase survey, how did you hear about us? And include several options that people can select. you can do that but proceed with caution right and this is where especially my co-author randy fishkin is extra like i really don't think this is a good idea and a lot of this uh this particular anecdote comes from his experience he was consulting with a brand and it was it was a ddc culinary brand.

21:18And so what he had them do was in their dropdown, he had them put, they had an influencer marketing option where, you know, that was one of the options. And so he had them include influencers who have never mentioned the product, right? So he basically asked them to include a decoy option, right? But that sounded likely. Sounded likely, but they verified, I made sure this person or these, they were celebrity, American TV chefs, like never talked about the brand. And so what happened was nearly 50 % of the respondents credited those influencers with how they heard about the brand. So the problem is you can include this in your post-purchase survey, but it's, you might get data like that, which is a lie, right?

22:14And obviously, it's not that your customers are out and out lying to you, right? They don't remember. They probably thought like, oh, yeah, I'm sure this person talked about this brand. That sounds right to me. It could have been their friend who mentioned it. Could have been a social media post. We don't know. And we'll never know. That is so risky. But how do you measure what's happening and what's working when there's no click? So what's difficult to answer here is that it looks very different for every business, like just based on how much revenue you have, how much spend you're doing. Right.

22:53Because I think in an ideal and unideal kind of scenario, it is incrementality testing and turning off or shutting down or sorry, turning down or shutting off your ads. Right. So we talk about this in the book as well. Dropbox did a study on this published in March, 2026, published in IEEE Access, where they tested, sorry, they did some blackout weeks of certain ads, right? So they turned off or turned down whole channels. So in this case, it was search engine marketing, SEM ads, and I believe mobile advertising. And so, you know, the baseline or the before, right, was everything was return on ad spend positive.

23:44Everything looked good. It might have been even like 2x. But then once they did the blackouts and then looked back at what was actually happening to their bottom line, they found that both of these ad programs were underwater, right? It was something like, for every dollar they spent, they were getting like 70 cents or 90 cents back, which is not good. They ended up putting, I believe it was$25 million towards better performing channels and it improved lifetime value to customer acquisition. That's a great example of that. So there's a version of that that smaller businesses can do too, which is turning down your ads.

24:26You can try that for a week or two, seeing how your business performs, In the meantime, you might not get the perfect exact like, okay, we spent X amount, we got this amount. You might not always get that perfect stuff, but you won't get the perfect number and attribution anyway. The thing you will know for certain is whether or not something is working. right so then at least you would know oh for sure you know the influencer or creator marketing oh for sure this is working for us great go keep doing that right or we see okay social media advertising is not working for us we have to fix this strategy right so we're not even saying hey don't run ads we're saying hey the only thing you can really the best most reliable thing you can do is to withhold some of the spend, see what happens, go back a week later.

25:26I think that's one of the most ideal kind of scenarios. In addition to or instead of that, we strongly recommend looking at a myriad of metrics, looking at things that are related to awareness slash exposure. So these are going to be the things like impressions of a social post, impressions or views on a YouTube video. So those metrics that are like, okay, great. We know that an average video for us gets 700 views. That's the baseline. Then we also recommend looking at your engagement metrics. These are going to be things like subscribers, followers, likes, comments, time spent on a page. Things that show the actions people are taking.

26:16And then finally, the business impact. Look at things like how many leads are you getting this month? Has pipeline grown? Have people done repeat orders? Has average order value increased? This is basically like what's happened to my business. And okay, you might not know the next day whether or not something worked, but you will get a sense of the overall health of your business. And that's ultimately what we all want, right? Healthy, healthier businesses. Absolutely, yes. We all want the platforms, the big walled gardens. I'm not sure they necessarily want that to happen. And you write about them in a really good way in the book.

26:59The over-reliance on the dashboards provided by Meta, by Google, just spending money on ads because that's what everyone does. That's what we have to be doing. Do we? If you're not testing it, if you're not making sure, I don't like the fact that everyone has to do it, and then they give you ROAS in the beginning and it starts going down and you just spend more. And I wish those platforms didn't have all the power that they have. And I'm sure there's a future where they don't. I'm positive I believe in that. The last question. Let's say someone has been asleep for two years. You're talking to a person in 2024 and there's this shift that's about to happen.

27:38And like, what should they do to be ready for the reality we have today? Your website is your source of truth. truth you're probably you're not going to spend all your time there you're probably not even going to update it once a week but that is your source of truth that is the record everything else just points to it but it cannot be implied the truth cannot be implied you need to be so clear painfully clear in what you're trying to say on your website and you need to repeat the same claim everywhere, all that stuff, because people get confused and machines get confused even more when they're reading information.

28:18This was amazing. The book is out now by the time this episode is out. So everyone listening, Zero Click Marketing, Amanda Natividad and Rand Fishkin, go and get the book, check out the book, follow Amanda on LinkedIn as well, follow her blog, her podcast. The links will all be in the show notes. Amanda, this is such an honor and wishing you the best with the book. Change the world, please. Make people care about this. Thank you so much, Sunny. This was so much fun. Thank you for being so thoughtful. So what's your website for if nobody clicks anymore? You heard Amanda's answer. It's your source of truth.

28:54You will not spend much time there. You might not update it every day or even every week or every month, but it's the record and everything else should point to it. Now, three things from this conversation stayed with me. She bought the clothes from a brand she never heard of before, found the brand through ChatGPT, bought it on the same day without seeing the homepage. She signed up for a tool whose homepage would have put her off because she would think that this is not for her because an AI sent her straight to the signup page, past the homepage. And then the survey with the made-up TV chefs in the dropdown, it got the credit from nearly half the customer because the results seem plausible.

29:40Your website still has a job. It's just not the job it had. Zero Click Marketing is out now. The link is in the show notes. If you want to listen or read No Hacks every week, you can subscribe at nohacks.co slash subscribe. Talk to you next week.