Sitelinks are the hyperlinks mentioned below any specific organic or paid search engine result to link to the website’s subpages. It gives benefits to both business owner and the user. As brands can more appropriately showcase the internal links of their web pages and user can locate easily their area of interests. But don’t get confused with sitelink extensions in Google AdWords, which are very similar but appear only in AdWords ads. Unlike organic links, Google AdWords users have full control over whether these links appear or not and what they will contain.
For example: If you search for a particular company then their website is going to appear as search result on SERPs. If you click on the main link you will be directed to their home page. But, just below that result there are some hyperlinks such as ‘Company Profile’, ‘About Us’, ‘Our Team’ & ‘Contact Us’, etc. These are known as sitelinks. Please see the image below
Impact of Sitelinks- These sitelinks increase the chances of getting more clicks on the links in order to gain more leads.
Process to getting sitelinks- If you search for a brand name, sitelinks will appear by default but you cannot instruct or force the search engines to give sitelinks to the results of your website. What you can do is just work hard in terms of SEO for your website so that search engine will consider your result and provide sitelinks. But in case of paid searches, you can instruct in Google AdWords to add sitelinks to your ads. But, even after there are chances that you may or may not get sitelinks.
Concept of Sitelink Extension:
Sitelink extensions are those which are most commonly used among available ad extensions in Google AdWords. The sitelinks provide the ability to promote additional links of your website within a single PPC ad. When you add a lot of links to your PPC ad these are known as sitelink extensions. Sitelinks will let people go to specific pages on your site i.e. your store hours, a selected product, or more. Once somebody clicks on your link, they skip right to what they require. These additional links provide many benefits for the advertisers using them. Please have a look at how these site links look like:
Sitelinks are typically located under your standard PPC headline and description lines, the example in the above image shows four sitelinks being used by this particular advertiser. Additionally, advertisers can add description lines to their sitelinks to further develop the context.
Why should we use sitelinks?
Adding sitelinks into your Google AdWords campaigns provides advertisers with numerous additional values. Here we are briefing it into three reasons why you need to start using sitelinks:
1. Increases click-through rates: Sitelink extensions make PPC ads to take up more space on the SERP, just like other ad extensions. That ultimately gives a rise in the CTR by 10-20% higher in the comparison of ads without sitelinks. Sitelinks implemented in the proper way is a great way to boost CTR.
2. Increase conversion rates: If sitelinks are implemented properly, there could be a visible rise in the conversion rates. And if you are providing your users with a lot of links and landing pages to fulfill their needs, users are more likely to convert faster.
3. No change in cost per click: It does not cost you more if you are using sitelinks so whether you add sitelinks to display with your ad or not, the average cost you pay for per click does not change.
Benefits of using Sitelinks:
Here are a few of the benefits of considering sitelinks implementation to your ads:
A. Get Updated easily: By using sitelink extensions you have an opportunity to change link text and URLs whenever you want and can keep them up-to-date for sales and another special offers. You have no need to make a new text ad or edit them to include sitelinks.
B. Get detailed data of clicks: It helps you to find out the no. of clicks occurred on your ad at the time when sitelinks appeared. You can break down the statistical data by campaign, ad group, or ad. It helps you to divide your statistics to see the number of clicks that occurred on the individual sitelink versus on another part of the ad i.e. the headline, another sitelinks, or another extension.
C. Edit your sitelink extensions without losing data: By using Sitelink Extensions in Google Adwords you can edit your sitelinks without resetting their performance statistics.
D. Customized sitelinks for mobile: Advertisers can create different mobile-optimized sitelinks to show on mobile devices.
E. Schedule with start and end dates: Sitelinks are the best way to highlight holiday sales or some limited-time offers and special deals. However, Google has its own algorithms to decide whether to show a Sitelink or not but even though marketers can specify the dates, days of the week or times of day when your sitelinks will be eligible to show. This increases the chances of visibility of a sitelink between those days or hours.
F. Highlight Certain Benefits: By using sitelink extensions advertisers can Highlight some Benefits and Features for example free shipping etc.
G. Help to promote other products/services: If you add sitelink extensions then you can mention the URL of other Landing Pages or web pages which can help you to promote other products or services you are offering. For example if you are writing an ad for PPC Company, you can use sitelinks of SEO services or Web designing company etc.
Best practices of Using Sitelinks:
When we start considering sitelinks addition in our campaigns or selecting links and copy for your sitelinks, following are the best practices you can follow to make it more effective.
1. Text in the links should be precise, relevant and relate directly to the landing page which it links to.
2. Landing page content or the text/description used in the sitelink should directly relate to the standard ad which the sitelink is paired with.
3. Advertisers shouldn’t use the same link text or description for multiple sitelinks.
4. No two sitelinks can link to the same page so you need to use a unique sitelink for each landing page or URL which you are using.
5. Marketers or their service providers should always keep in mind not to use symbols and too much punctuation marks.
6. You can redirect a user to a download page, but avoid using “download here” or “click to download” kind of phrases in the link text.
Final Thought:
Sitelink Extensions are a great way of to boost CTR (click-through-rate) and conversion rate. But the condition is, these need to be implemented properly. These extensions offer the advertisers with a lot of benefits and extra volume over your standard PPC ads which you generally create. And the good thing about it is that these extensions have no extra cost associated with. So the recommendation will be to use Sitelink Extensions to the Google Adwords Campaigns.
