Let’s start with Google sitelinks. What are they? Have you ever Googled yourself to see what you appear like? Not how rank, but how your site looks visually in the search results page.

You should.

Table of contents

Key Highlights:

  1. Google Sitelinks Explained: Discover what Google Sitelinks are and how they differ from Google Ads sitelinks, offering a boost in your website’s visibility in organic search results.
  2. Visibility and CTR Benefits: Learn how Sitelinks can dramatically increase your site’s visibility on the SERP, pushing down less relevant results and potentially boosting your Click Through Rate (CTR).
  3. Quality Content and Internal Linking: Understand the importance of producing remarkable content and the role of strategic internal linking in improving the quality and relevance of your Sitelinks.
  4. SEO Enhancements: Get insights into auditing your internal links, updating your sitemap, and submitting pages for indexing to optimize your site for better search engine rankings.
  5. Backlink Quality: Grasp the significance of acquiring high-quality backlinks to further enhance your SEO efforts and avoid the pitfalls of toxic links.

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 sitelinks in Google Ads; these are sitelinks in organic search results.

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. they typically appear after performing a “branded search”.

lines for sitelinks

1 – your page title, 2 – site links

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.

To improve both these links showing up and the quality of your sitelinks – work on internal linking of your content, and it’s quality.

Sitelinks can be a telltale sign of how your website is performing. As in, what content is important to your website visitors (those you want and maybe not). But it can also tell you what you may not want to be important to your brand that you are communicating.

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.

Other Google features

Paid ads, featured snippets, image carousels, job packs, knowledge graph results, local packs, news carousels, ask boxes, related searches, shopping, sitelinks, and video carousels.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is featured-snippet.png

A Featured Snippet in the Google SERP – position 0

Internal content links

Once you get to writing awesome content to start linking up to other articles and pages on your site.

Even give credit to sites you are referencing in your content by linking to them. They may link back! Plus, it’s just goodwill and gives the original author proper credit for the quotes you’ve added to your website.
Unfortunately, a lot of the content out there isn’t worth linking to. About 75% of it receives no inbound links at all. So, if you’re looking for links, ditch the idea that “more is better.” Focus on quality instead. Your content will only attract links if it’s genuinely outstanding—what Seth Godin calls “remarkable.”

– Brian Sutter, Forbes.com

Next in your search bar in Google or any search engine type:

site:domain.com exactly as that using your domain, no http or slashes.

Doing this you’ll see exactly what pages are indexed on your site. The count will be in the upper left of the pages (and posts) you have on the index. If pages are showing up, then you have a problem with your sitemap.xml or robots.txt files.

If your site has several pages, you need to check your click depth. If it takes more than three clicks to reach your content, you should change it to make it easier to access. Next, look for broken links and redirects (301s and 410s), and fix any broken links (404s). Additionally, make sure that no more than 25% of your site uses 301 redirects.

While nothing I’ve found has shown that 404’s are bad for SEO, having too many is. This leads to users having a bad experience on your website. Which is what Google RankBrain can demote you on the SERP – in theory as Google has never stated what RankBrain does, but many can infer this is a part of it’s function.

Update your sitemap

Your website’s sitemap is critical to keep updated as you create more content to publish. The sitemap tells Google crawlers what page you want indexed. Without a sitemap.xml on your sites has less of a chance to improve it’s SEO since you are not in control of what is indexed or not.

Submit your pages for indexing

Indexing is your pages on the search engine results page (SERP). It’s simply adding pages to the SERP for search. How your website is constructed matters as much as how you have added content to the pages via the editor. So if you do not use, have, or manage a Google Console account, fix that.

One key to improving SEO is quality backlinks. Backlinks are like a vote “yes” to your website and the content you are publishing.

Years ago you could buy backlinks, but then Google realized that website owners were “gaming” the system to rank higher in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Now Google penalizes you, or removes you from the SERP for that practice.

Today a backlink that isn’t high quality can be considered to be toxic, therefore pull you down with it. If you’re paying for monthly SEO services, monitoring of backlinks is included and prevents this toxicity by disavowing those bad votes you don’t want.