SiteLinks Can Increase The Quality of Your Paid Campaign

Last year in June, when Google introduced enhanced campaign, they also introduced another feature called, enhancement to sitelinks, which enables site owners and SEO guys a chance to add descriptive test for exact sitelinks. Sitelink is a great feature really, the best way to increase your CTR if you ask us. This is also good for branding terms, as Google stresses upon.

There are two direct advantages of having this, enhancement to sitelinks. Firstly, it allows you to add direct link to multiple pages of your website when you are running your paid campaigns. Secondly, it gives you more real estate on the SERP screen for your paid search results, obviously.

Sitelinks directly influences ad rank and a better written sitelinks description can easily improve the rank of your advert on the search page. Ad rank used to be decided by the cost per click CPC and the quality score of the ad but the ad extensions and sitelinks are also being taken into the calculation.

So, how difficult is this to implement? Sounds easy, doesn’t it? However, the reality is little different. Firstly, what surprises me is that very few and rare companies are taking advantage of this, at least to the fullest possible extreme. This is the reason why Google was forced to actually note this thing publicly, in a blog post, last January. If you google, may be 1 out of three companies are using this and the two which are not using, they are also knee deep into the SEO as well. As surprising as it might sound!

These additional descriptions can actually be more handy in describing links to specific pages of the website. For example, if you are writing more about a link, then the user will understand more by simply reading the link structure. They are getting more useful information and relevant information. Google tested it and found the CTR is significantly improved once you start using these enhanced sitelinks over traditional sitelinks.

However, when we googled for products, we saw mostly the traditional site links are being used, instead of the descriptive text versions which are so much more effective.

Surprising as it might sound, implementing this feature is rather easy. When you add a new link, Google provides you with a field to write the descriptions. You can put the description here and use a call to action button here or even promote a special offer.

When this descriptive sitelinks are used, which many companies did when they became available, the CTR for branded links become significantly higher. Not only the companies were able to supply more information to the clients but they were able to actually gain ad ranking on the display page. The ad captured much more space and also the ad looked much more relevant to the search query as well.

Some major points which you should remember while utilising these links are:

• Use call to action as much as you can. This is a great way to move traffic to your site’s internal pages directly which are more relevant.
• Use information to entice users more, like free shipping or discounts.
• Consider each site link as a different ad or an ad inside another ad. With each sitelink being described, you can gain from multiple ads.
• Run tests regularly. Use this Pauline Jokober’s article and audit your sitelinks. This way you can know what is working and what needs a tweak.

Sitelinks can give the users much more information about your site and make them land on the exact page which has the things they want. When more information comes with ad, the user likes it more. We all should ideally be using this feature, shouldn’t we?