Beyond the Form: Make Your Website a Conversion Powerhouse in the Age of AI
The reality is, everyone now lives in a zero click Internet world.
Your website serves as your central hub where customers can learn about your products or services, for brand interaction, purchases, and ultimately contribute to conversions across various channels.
No longer do conversions typically begin and end on your website. Rather, sites essentially consolidate the customer journey and provide a consistent experience regardless of their initial touchpoint. You do not “own” other touchpoints, like your Facebook profile, Crunchbase, Clutch, Health Grade profile, etc; you do own your website. That is why it is your entity hub and you need an AI SEO strategy.
Table of Contents
- Key Reasons why Websites are More Important than Just Form Conversions
- Key Roles of a Website in Multichannel Conversions
- Update Your Converting Traffic Strategy For Higher Conversion Rates
- Tracking Traffic from AI Chatbots
- Multichannel Marketing Strategy For Conversions in AI Search
- Additional Tips For Winning Clicks in AI Search
- SUMMARY: Thriving in a Zero-Click World: Maximizing Your Website’s Value for Conversions
The Growing Challenge of Website Conversion Measurement
In essence, people conducting searches are finding information they want without needing to visit your site.
“Zero-click results”, also known as “no-click discovery,” occur because people are finding information about your brand or product immediately on search engine results pages (SERPs). Think of it as getting mentioned in a conversation, but without a direct link to you. More and more, platforms are incentivized to keep them there. This makes it more challenging to drive traffic to your website; prospective prospects may be contacting you by other methods.
Why are Zero Click Results on the Rise?
- Social Media Trends: Social media platforms want its users to stay on their platform. They often suppress posts with external links, almost “hiding” where to click through to your site – even when you are directly mentioned.
- Platform Incentives: The main goal of these platforms is to drive traffic to paid ads, not to other websites. Sending traffic to external websites are disincentivized.
- Generative AI Search: Tools like Gemini and ChatGPT are accelerating this trend. They may display information about your brand or product based on their knowledge base, but they skip citing sources or providing direct links to websites. People are satisfied with answers within the AI interface itself.
The function of the website has changed and the measurement of leads has changed.
Now that we understand the challenges, let’s explore how to leverage your website’s strengths in this new environment.
Key Roles of a Website in Multichannel Conversions
Its time to look beyond form conversions on your website.
Your site is often accessed through links from other marketing channels in addition to organic search. You do need an active presence on these channels to be visible on line in 2025. SEO, content creation, and user experience optimization are rapidly evolving. Your website needs to work in partnership with these other platforms in a world where multichannel conversions are a norm.
In 2025, websites are more important than just form conversions. Most often, your website serves as your entity home for brand building, customer engagement, information dissemination, launching your marketing campaigns, and overall online presence.
To earn long-term business growth, we must think beyond traditional lead generation. Your website “works” to first establish credibility, showcase products/services comprehensively, demonstrates who you are and what you do best. Essentially, an effective website acts as a digital storefront that interacts with customers on multiple levels, not just through a single conversion point.
Many former sources of converting clicks now seek to complete people’s query journey on their own platform over sending them to a website. So how do we make our website’s effective for driving revenue in this changing world?
Key Reasons why Websites are More Important than Just Form Conversions
The enduring value of a website (even without direct conversions):
- Information hub.
- Demonstrating a helpful posture.
- Brand building.
- Nurturing current customer relationships.
- Customer education.
Information Hub
A website provides comprehensive product descriptions, specifications, pricing, and other relevant details that customers need to make informed purchase decisions, often accessed through links from other marketing channels.
A website’s ontology and taxonomies can connect comprehensive and organized information on a specific topic, products, and the vocabulary of its users. Given trends and emerging query terms, it changes as often as the language itself.
Semantic triples assist in contextual understanding and information retrieval, enriching the structured knowledge you provide.
Demonstrating a Helpful Posture
“Helpfulness” is a beautiful quality in itself. Giving without an expection of return demonstrates the true character of being centered on people’s needs. Google Search continuously expresses its intent to surface truely helpful content. Pay back will come over time; building trust as a go-to source starts with relationship building.
Getting buyers to purchase from you starts begins with caring for their needs. Sellers who focus on providing helpful advice, thoughtful persuasion, and being provocative where people converse is the ultimate conversion that you likely cannot track.
Example of helpful content (Highest Quality Pages):
Google’s January 2025 Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines give Christian Science Monitor a high score for:
- Content quality: Whether the content is up-to-date, accurate, and provides unique and insightful information.
- Content purpose: Whether the purpose of the content is clear and meets the user’s needs.
“This is the homepage of a newspaper that has won several prestigious awards and has a positive reputation for its objective reporting. The articles on the homepage are original reporting by professional journalists (effort, skill, and original content unique to this site).”
Example of poor content (Lowest Quality Pages):
“The contents of the page show it is created with generative AI with likely no original content and provides no value to users. For example, the article starts with “As a language model, I don’t have real-time data and my knowledge cutoff date is September 2021. Cancer rankings…” The end of the text of the article appears to be cut off with an incomplete sentence “Pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (NETs): Pancreatic NETs are a rare type of pancreatic cancer that can have a poor”
Brand Building Through Visibility
A website acts as a digital representation of your brand, allowing you to control the narrative and project a professional image to potential customers. Each business niche offers unique opportunities. Some are more suitable for text marketing, viral marketing, expert authorship, video marketing, influencer marketing, social media marketing, events, local partnerships, etc.
“Brand visibility” impacts website conversions. It means strategically establishing a unique and compelling brand image in the minds of potential customers. This ultimately influences their decision to convert on your website. Clearly communicating your value proposition and differentiating your offer from competitors, can lead to higher conversion rates.
Basically, anything that inspires people to talk about your business reminds them and others of your brand.
Nurturing Current Customer Relationships:
Capture behavioral data to improve website optimization that leads to better conversion metrics. Every day, your current clients, patients, and customers could go somewhere else. You stay top of mind by continuing to offer additional value through strategic content building.
Ask yourself, how can I improve so that they don’t go to another source to get answers to questions on the SERP?
Create featured snippet-optimized content that directly answers common customer questions. This builds trust that you understand user’s needs. Iincreases the chances of your website’s information being displayed in Google’s AI answers, even if users don’t click through.
Fix technical issues so they don’t hang up conversions:
Implement structured data markup (schema) that is specifically designed for search entity understanding. This helps Google’s AI understand the context of your content and improves its chances of being displayed in relevant search results. Prioritize schema types like Product, Service, FAQPage, and HowTo. Use entities, context, and knowledge graphs to maximize your content reach and understand search queries.
Customer Education:
Beyond just forms, a website can provide educational content like comparison products, customized services, infographics, tabular data tables, FAQs, blog posts, and other content that can educate and engage visitors. Once your website has built its educational content library, if done correctly, educated visitors are easier to convert into paying customers.
Showcase your expertise to educate by creating in-depth content, citing factual sources, and provide users and AI bots with author bios with credentials. Build trust by displaying customer reviews, testimonials, and security certifications prominently.
Content types that educate and lead to better informed buying decisions:
- Guides and User Manuals This may be product setup details, basic product functions, troubleshooting, and advanced product features, or healthcare protocols. You have to see past how much you need immediate revenue and see how this saves you money by minimizing the need for customer support inquiries.
- Dialogues: Simulations of real-world conversations where user decisions impact the results. Someone may tell others about you in a Reddit conversation, or social media, or other conversational platforms. Real-life stories and reviews from happy patients or buyers helps other envision their own path to you.
- Gamification: Leaderboards and badges can make the learning process more engaging.
- Testimonials & Interviews: User interviews are an important method in user experience research and development. They help to gain insights about unmet needs and needs met. Well written and well conducted interviews are the cornerstone for gathering useful qualitative data. Examples: First-hand accounts of life on campus can motivate potential students. What it is like to work for a company helps draw the best staff. How rewarding it was to support a cause draws potential partners who fund an endeavor.
- Videos: Videos of a how to do specific therapeutic exercise, a business’s history, learn who we are, or “meet our clinic’s providers” can help build prospective conversions. Content in video format is ideal for addressing pain points and intorducing your solutions.
- AR/VR simulations: Immersive learning experiences that help learners understand complex concepts.
Interactive Lead Generation
Harness data in the age of AI to better a website and its click-through rate (CTR).
Your website acts as the primary landing point for leads generated through other marketing efforts like social media, email, or paid advertising. Once you can drive traffic to your website, forms on the website can capture customer information like email addresses. This allows for further nurturing through email marketing campaigns.
Track user engagement with AI-powered website features (e.g., chatbot interactions, personalized recommendations) helps you refine your lead gen strategy. Analyze this data to identify areas for improvement and optimize the user experience.
Look deeper than CTRs on individual ads; aggregating all clicks on all ads on the page.
Google has claimed is that AI Overviews are leading to more follow-up searches. They do surface the opportunity to “ask a follow-up question.” Currently, its very difficult to track the total number of clicks, not just rates, on the answers that surface.
As of now, there is no direct way to track the exact number of clicks on Google AI Overviews within Google Analytics or any built-in Google tool. Currently, the data lacks click details. We test SERPs directly. Also, one can use third-party SEO tools like Ahrefs to monitor the visibility of your website within AI Overviews. This helps us gain an approximate idea of potential click volume based on search query ranking data.
Interactive & engaging website lead generation methods beyond the traditional form submission:
- Resource libraries.
- SMS opt-in.
- Free tools & downloads (Calculators & Configurators).
- Contests & giveaways.
- Live chat.
- Quizzes & Assessments.
Update Your Converting Traffic Strategy For Higher Conversion Rates
A well-optimized website can attract significant organic traffic from search engines, increasing visibility and reach without relying solely on paid advertising. Expand your marketing efforts. While many conversant platforms don’t send direct visits, they do influence people to buy, or to choose a brand. However, you still need traffic to your website for converting data.
Here is a list of thing your SEO AI strategist will likely focus on.
Getting found in AI platforms
September 2024 introduced llms.txt, a new type of Markdown formatting that website owners can use to optimize their content for AI systems. Providing this file comprised of a concise, structured data overview of your site’s essential information ensures more accurate indexing, training, and AI retrieval by Large Language Models (LLMs).
Customer experience and loyalty:
Conversions are only possible if you provide great customer experiences. A user-friendly website with intuitive navigation and valuable content can accomplish this. Offering value and positive experiences encourages repeat visits and customer loyalty. This is critical on the journey to purchase.
Data gathering and insights:
Analytics tools on a website provide valuable data about visitor behavior, allowing businesses to tailor their marketing strategies and improve user experience. Your website is a valuable source of owned, inhouse data for LLMs, datasets, and semantic mappings.
Adaptability and Future-Proofing:
A well-designed website can be easily updated and adapted to incorporate new technologies and trends, ensuring it remains relevant in the evolving digital landscape. It provides important data if you are considering adding a new product or service, expanding, revising or for other types of future decisions.
Rich elements analysis:
Understanding a website’s value as a force for driving revenue begins with tracking query phrase ranking positions, but must go much deeper. It also involves analyzing the presence and quality of the ability to gain “rich elements” like Knowledge Panels, image carousels, AIO answers, and featured snippets that appear in the SERP. Each one can significantly impact click-through rates and conversions.
Implementing essential e-Commerce schema markup can boost performance.
Identifying issues:
By analyzing which search queries lead to low click-through rates or negative sentiment in the SERP, we pinpoint areas where content optimization or reputation management can ultimately lead to CRO improvements.
Tracking Traffic from AI Chatbots
Use AI-powered chatbots to provide instant customer support and guide visitors through the sales funnel.
Tracking traffic from AI chatbots is now an essential part of conversion optimization for AI Search. You can set up this reporting in Google Analytics 4. It involves creating an exploration with “page referrer” as the dimension and “sessions” as the metric. Then apply your filter.
Since Google has expanded AI Overviews, it’s important to understand how AIO tracking works in Google Search Console as well. We’ll go further into that topic in another post. You can minimize risks of making quick or biased judgments based solely on your own understanding.
To resolve organic traffic issues and achieve higher conversions, focus on creating high-quality, relevant content optimized for targeted long-tail keywords, consistently provide fresh information, leverage AI conversational search, multisearch, authoritative backlinks, and carefully analyze user behavior for refinements.
This lets you add or tweak calls-to-action and landing pages, all while monitoring and adjusting your SEO strategy based on data insights. With insights shared across all teams, it is easier to gain marketing alignment.
Multichannel Marketing Strategy For Conversions in AI Search
SERP Volatility impacts brand visibility – a lack of visibility negatively impacts lead opportunities – fewer leads impacts your revenue opportunity.
Having a strong personal brand is like holding an all-access pass to being findable and heard. How and where you’re visible is evolving. The bottom line is that your revenue depends on “visibility” across multiple channels.
It may feel like analytics tools that have traditionally allowed marketers to monitor which channels are driving traffic are drying up. Tools and conversion measurement strategies are changing. We have to chance to in order to know which actions lead to conversions. Data insights are key to enabling optimization of your overall multichannel strategy for brand awareness.
Expanding your marketing efforts to new types
Email marketing landing pages: Dedicated landing pages on the website can be used for targeted email campaigns. If you’ve tried and dropped email marketing in the past, today, you may need to revisit it. You need multiple ways to direct users to specific product, service, or event information or promotions.
Interactive features, text marketing, live chat on the website – all can enhance customer engagement and build trust before a purchase.
Rand Fiskin of Sparktoro has long thought out-of-the-box and inspired many a deep conversation about “zero click” marketing changes.
“Marketing in 2025 isn’t about getting clicks. It’s about influencing the right people in the right places. What to do lies right here in these three steps, in the problem discovery, brand awareness, and further education sections of where influence happens. We are no longer in the world where you need to get traffic in order to have influence on your audience and your customers.”” – Traffic Is Down; Revenue Is… Up?
Additional Tips For Winning Clicks in AI Search
Key points to remember:
Quality traffic: A converting click is a website’s ultimate goal. However, we also look at traffic quality and the life-time value of a customer. A converting click strategy can be very different for B2B lead generation versus B2C lead generation.
Produce fresh and quality content: Maintain a regular publishing schedule. The most important factor contributing to a website’s revenue is high-quality content that directly addresses the needs and preferences of your audience. Users who are actively engaged with the content are likely to interact with advertisements, book appointments, or make purchases. This is often achieved through strong SEO practices and consistent value-added content creation.
Mobile friendly: Conversion rate only measures a specific action. It tells you how many visitors took a desired action (like a purchase or sign-up), but doesn’t necessarily reflect how well the website is performing overall. It should include conversion data from mobile advertising. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly and mobile-optimized to handle AI-generated traffic from mobile devices. This is a must-have due to the rise in mobile device usage.
Maintain SERP visibility: If there’s one thing that’s become crystal clear, it’s this: dropping out of SERP visibility is expensive. Mixed brand signals frustrate users. Blind spots in monitoring your website’s usefulness can be catastrophic. This likely means volving your strategy for conversions in AI Overviews and Knowledge Panels.
Business websites benefit from a fresh marketing plan and updated content strategy to be effective in 2025. Be agile. Websites stuck in the past are converting less today. Your updated efforts can be tested by a SERP analyst for maintaining SERP visibility in the face of AI competition.
SUMMARY: Thriving in a Zero-Click World: Maximizing Your Website’s Value for Conversions
While form conversions are important, a comprehensive website does more than provide leads. It also contributes to long-term business success by building brand awareness, providing needed information, fostering customer engagement, and establishing visibility, not to mention saving staff support time.