I know both myself and others have covered this in previous posts. We should be careful to avoid generalizing nearly 500 years of interaction between Europeans and American Indians across a continent spanning from the arctic to the antarctic. However, the terms 'conquest' and 'genocide' are not mutually exclusive. Academics can and do use both to describe parts of the colonial era, because there were elements of both in the events that transpired.^1

It's important to understand that diseases were not simply a passive and inevitable force sweeping across the continent, with Europeans helpless and purely innocent of their effects. No one could have predicted the initial devastation from contact for the Americas, but Europeans took quick advantage of the opportunities provided by disease. The conquests of Mexico and Ecuador by the Spanish were greatly aided by the devastation of pox. But no single epidemics could ever have so utterly devastated native populations as colonialism did. European policies in the wake of conquest deliberately kept native inhabitants in poor conditions, working brutal conditions, in close contact with the ill and infirm. Food was often in short supply and hygienic water sources poisoned or diverted by settlers for their own purposes. Where natives occupied resources settlers wanted, they were removed by force. If native groups in the Spanish Americas caused trouble, they were lucky to be enslaved and deported to inhumane mines far away. If a spanish bureaucrat decided they were looking a little too wealthy, their wealth could be forcibly seized. Existing political divisions in the north were bothersome, so families and tribes were split up for no reason more than to make the paperwork easier. Even after the Europeans had withdrawn following the independence wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, genocide continued into the 20th. American indians were deprived of their ability to own land or participate in the legal systems of their countries. They were forced to form tribal governments under the control of European-descended polities. Groups that had remained independent were hunted down. An Apache warrior's scalp would earn you $100 Spanish dollars if you brought it to a government office in Sonora or Chihuahua. Natives were forced into reservations on the worst land and told to learn how to farm rocks. When they inevitably failed, governments begrudgingly "gave" them food supplies that would be illegal at a modern prison. Schools for re-education had the deliberate policy to destroy as much native culture as possible. Natives were encouraged to integrate into European-descended society, to forget their heritage and give up their few remaining possessions. For those that did, they still faced systematic discrimination.

To answer your question, genocide absolutely occurred. The conquest of the Americas was incomparable to any event in history before. No previous period had policies so systematically designed to completely and utterly destroy "the native". These policies weren't comprehensive and fragmented by the fractured nature of American governance, but their existence is one of the few universal realities across the Americas.

^1 I am deliberately avoiding the difficult question of what constitutes 'genocide' and whether we can retroactively apply the label to historic events. This is a perfectly valid question and one that's been extensively discussed in the literature, famously in Churchill's controversial A Little Matter of Genocide.