Let’s start with Google sitelinks, what are they? Have you ever Google’d yourself to see what you appear like? Not rank, but look like visually in the search results page.
You should, it’s quite a surprise for most business owners.
Google sitelinks are an important factor to determine what’s happening with your presence on the search engine. To be clear these are not the links in ads, but organic search results.
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What are Google Sitelinks?
Google only shows sitelinks for results if they are useful to your users. They appear in the search engine results page (SERP) below the main search result.
1. is the search result and 2. is the results Google sitelinks in the SERP
Depending on your website’s configuration, then it will not allow the search engine to find good sitelinks to show. Or Google doesn’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query.
Do not listen to promises that someone can 100% manipulate these for you. To improve both these links showing up and the quality of your sitelinks. Make sure your content is using the correct amount of “alt” tags in anchor links. Don’t stuff keywords or use repetitive words.
Sitelinks can be a telltale sign of how your site is performing, and what content is important to users. But it can also tell you what you may not want to be important.
Do you have a careers page?
That’s good, but only if it matters to users searching for jobs. So, you’ll probably find it in the sitelinks in the search results. If your careers page isn’t getting much traffic and isn’t important to your users (look at your Google Analytics), then there’s an issue.
Why are a sitelinks good for my results?
For starters Google sitelinks are amazing. Take a look at how much real estate you are taking up on the SERP. This gives the SERP to be more about you and pushes down results that are not as clean.
They can improve your Click Thru Rate (CTR) on your results boosting your page rankings. CTR is an important factor in SEO (one of about 200).
Sitelinks are Google search features, one of which Google has been adding over the years to the SERP. The tradeoff with these “features” is that more real estate is given to Google features and less to you to place on the SERP.
Google features are:
Paid ads, featured snippets, image carousels, job packs, knowledge graph results, local packs, news carousels, ask boxes, related searches, shopping, sitelinks, and video carousels.
A Featured Snippet in the Google SERP
A study on how Google SERP features impact.
Sitelinks results at 47% suggests that searches are mostly navigational queries, helping consumers to navigate through the web.
That’s very important to understand how important your websites, design, internal links, and content is written and structured.
Branded Queries vs Non-Branded
…branded query results came in at 71.36%. Non-branded queries came in at 37.88%. As Google implements search features, the chance to obtain organic search traffic may well decline…
So a branded query, that is they searched for your name. These yield higher CTR’s than those not including your name. Branded keywords are any that — you guessed it — contain your brand’s name. Which in turn translates to better SEO and higher ranking.
Therefore, by optimizing your branded keyword presence, we are optimizing keywords that will inherently have 2x or more conversions.
Schema Markup
Other technical aspects are the Schema that is used on the site for the search engine to see. Especially for job pages as businesses begin to reopen and look for help during the hiring season.
Conclusion
If you have an SEO question or would like us to look at your website, it’s free of charge. Just by us a coffee or if it’s Jason, he likes RootBeer.
On our next blog posts, we’ll discuss what else you get for your dollar spent on SEO. That is Yoast SEO configuration and content edits for readability.
Stay tuned! If you like this post please let us know in the comments and share it.