SEO
Sitelinks are basically links that point to various sections on your website. They help improve CTR (clickthrough rate) as they make the browsing experience of users very easy. To help paint a better picture, imagine that you are googling for a bakery that takes online orders. You stumble upon their website on google, but don’t click on it just yet. If the website has sitelinks, you’ll find various sections of their website page listed on the google search page itself. Thus, you won’t have to open the site and then look for a particular section. You can directly go to sections such as ‘about us,’ or ‘homepage.’ Optimizing these sitelinks and improving their appearance becomes even more important as that helps in improving the CTR. You can do this yourself, or you can get expert digital marketers to do it for you. For the latter, you will need to find a decent digital marketing agency that can really help your website. Boomcycle Digital Marketing, for instance, is one of those digital marketing companies that try to provide their clients with a complete digital marketing experience. With professionals by your side, your CTR and lead conversion rate will soar high up in the sky!
Importance of Sitelinks:
As any SEO expert will tell you, sitelinks are extremely important if you want to establish your business’ presence on the internet. Although you can’t influence sitelinks directly, it is still important to have them. If Google decides to show your sitelinks on its search results page along with your website snippet, you have to ensure that they are optimized and look well. Here are some reasons why you should optimize and improve the appearance of your sitelinks:
1: Well-optimized sitelinks increase clickthrough rates (CTR)
As mentioned before, sitelinks can greatly increase your clickthrough rates. Users tend to click on websites whose sitelinks Google displays as they take up a majority of space on the search result page. When your sitelinks are displayed, the visibility of your website increases.
2: Increase visits to important sections located inside your website
There might be some sections on your website where you want the traffic to land. Without sitelinks, any traffic will probably land on your homepage first. However, if your sitelinks have that section’s link in them, traffic can directly land on that section of your website. Thus, sitelinks become very useful in such a scenario.
3: Increases credibility
Sitelinks also increase the credibility of your website. Informed users know that Google only displays the sitelinks of sites that it trusts. Thus, if you have sitelinks, the user will tend to trust you more. That will increase your brand awareness, CTR, and subsequently, lead conversion rates.
Improving the Appearance of Sitelinks on Google:
Now that you know how important sitelinks are for SEO and your business’s online presence, let us show you how to optimize them and improve their appearance.
1: Remove undesirable sitelinks
Google removed the feature that allowed business owners to remove undesired sitelinks. However, there are still ways you can remove them. First, you’ll have to identify those unwanted sitelinks. To do this, you will have to crawl your website to see the sitelinks you want to remove. Once you have a list of them, you can make the changes and resubmit them in Google Search Console.
2: Noindex unwanted pages in the sitelinks
There might be some pages on your website that you may not want to show in sitelinks. To remove them, you will have to ‘noindex’ them. This process removes that page from the search results altogether and prevents it from getting organic traffic. Only use this feature if you have an outdated page on your website. You can look up tutorials online to get acquainted with the process of ‘noindex.’
3: Use proper anchor text and alt text
A proper anchor text will help those who visit your website with information. The sitelinks in themselves might not be of too much information. Some proper anchor text under them can help your visitors get the information they are looking for. Alt text has the same function too. Both anchor text and alt text improve the browsing experience of any user that stumbles upon the sitelinks of your website.
4: Optimize your website and have a proper structure in place
Your sitelinks will only help you get so far. After all, the traffic has to land on your website itself. Having a proper website structure helps in improving the appearance of your sitelinks. Make sure that you have a clear hierarchy of sections on your website. You also have to make sure that there is appropriate interlinking on your website as it has a mostly positive impact on sitelinks. Get a proper digital marketing firm to do this task for you as they can optimize your website to the fullest.
Thanks for reading.
