As a marketer, you know the importance of strong search engine rankings.
This is how you get highly targeted organic traffic for months and even years on autopilot.
While rankings are important, you also need more people to click on your sites in search engine results.
One way to increase your CTR is with Google Sitelinks.
But what are Google Sitelinks? How can they help your site? And most importantly, how do you get them?
In this guide, I will show you the answers to all these questions, and more.
Let’s get started:
What are Sitelinks?
Google Sitelinks are little sub-listings that appear under the first result in the search result. Usually when searching for brands.
You must have come across to them on number of occasions. This is what they look like:
The four links under BloggingWizard.com along with the “More results from bloggingwizard.com” link are called “Sitelinks”.
Note: Open up Google Search in a new tab and search for Blogging Wizard to see a live example.
The purpose of Sitelinks is to help users navigate around your website. A user searching for “Blogging Wizard” might not necessarily want to see the homepage. Instead, they might be interested in heading directly to the blog page or the about page.
Sitelinks remove one step from this navigation process by placing important links right within the search results.
In a nutshell, they direct users to the best results in the shortest amount of time. And they make your site more prominent in search results, which is important for branding purposes.
Sitelinks have been around for nearly a decade. They first made an appearance around 2005. By 2007, they were a regular feature in search results.
This is what they used to look like in 2007:
Since then, they’ve gone through several iterations to get to what you see today.
And Google has also reduced the number of Sitelinks from a maximum of twelve to six.
The point is, the number, type and design of Sitelinks will keep changing over time. The optimization methods to get Sitelinks, however, will largely remain the same.
Sitelinks aren’t displayed for every website
If you search for a slightly obscure or poorly optimized site, there is a good chance Google won’t show Sitelinks for it.
And for some sites, it might even go beyond the regular 2/4/6-pack of Sitelinks to show a search box, like they do for AboveTheLaw.com:
We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don’t think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.
From the above, we can say that Google might not show Sitelinks due to two reasons:
- The site structure doesn’t allow algorithms to find good Sitelinks
- The Sitelinks aren’t relevant to the user’s query
While you can’t control what users search for, you can design your site in a way to improve Sitelink discovery.
Which is what we will focus on in this guide.
But first: why exactly are Sitelinks actually important?
Let’s find out:
Why are Google Sitelinks important?
For searchers, Sitelinks save time and provide relevant results.
But what benefit are they to you?
1. Sitelinks improve CTR (click-through rates)
Besides rankings, your CTR is one of the biggest factors in successfully generating organic traffic.
On average, the first three results account for nearly 55% of all clicks.
These numbers do fluctuate over time. But, let’s use them as an example:
If a keyword gets 10,000 searches each month, this means that the first result gets 3,124 clicks.
Now imagine that the first result also gets Sitelinks. Since the Sitelinks now dominate the top half of the page (i.e. above the fold), the first result gets 20% extra clicks.
This translates into an additional 2,000 clicks each month – pretty good, right?!
In fact, one case study by PPC-Hero found that Sitelinks increased CTR by almost 64%.
Keep in mind that Sitelinks also show up in paid search results. One study found a direct correlation between sitelink visibility and the CTR. After the advertiser stopped showing Sitelinks, CTR plunged from over 20% to nearly 10%.
The number of leads reduced accordingly.
The lesson: if you want more people to click on your site in search results or ads, get Sitelinks.
2. Sitelinks build more trust and credibility
Sitelinks are an important metric to determine the trustworthiness of a website.
When you see Sitelinks on a website, it is a sign that Google trusts that website enough to give them Sitelinks.
If you were to search for an obscure, unpopular site with poor trust ratings; chances are you wouldn’t see Sitelinks.
What about a site with the opposite characteristics? Chances are you’ll see Sitelinks.
Understand that Google knows Sitelinks take up nearly the entire above the fold screen real estate. This pushes all search results further down the fold.
Since Google is committed to giving its users the best possible experience, it wouldn’t want to promote an untrustworthy link above the fold.
Google’s algorithm isn’t perfect, so it does make mistakes. But, it gets better all the time.
3. Sitelinks increase your brand and product awareness
Sitelinks usually link out to the most important pages on your site (from Google’s perspective), taking into account the number of internal/external links.
More often than not, these will be your ‘about’ or ‘product’ pages.
This makes Sitelinks a great way to educate people about your products, and improve brand awareness.
For example, when you search for Tim Ferriss’ “FourHourWorkWeek”, you see links to his podcast and the book that made him famous:
4. Sitelinks allow users to browse deeper pages
When a user visits your website, chances are they will browse through the homepage, product and service pages.
In total they might visit 4-5 pages of your website before they decide to leave.
Let me ask you:
Are they going to visit your most popular blog post? Or will they dig around to find the resources page that gives you your best conversions?
Probably not.
With Sitelinks, however, these popular links will show up in search results, driving traffic to your most important pages.
For example, Noah Kagan’s website, OkDork, has Sitelinks that show his most popular blog posts, a welcome guide for new users, his about page and a link to his free marketing toolkit:
This helps drive traffic to pages that actually deliver results (leads/subscribers) instead of simply directing people to the home page.
How to get Google Sitelinks for your website
There is no direct way to get Sitelinks for your website. You can’t just log into Google’s Search Console (Previously Webmaster Tools), flick a switch and get Sitelinks.
As things stand right now:
- Sitelinks are automated
- Sitelinks are created through website best practices
- Google doesn’t tell you how to create Sitelinks or control their appearance directly
Unfortunately, there are no fixed steps that you can follow to get Sitelinks on your website, but you can follow a process to increase your chances of getting Sitelinks.
Here’s how to get started:
1. Make sure that your website’s name is unique
The first step in getting Sitelinks is to make sure that you use a unique brand name for your site.
For example, if your website is called ‘The ice cream company’ it is likely that it will never gain first result on the first page because the term is too generic.
There