In my previous post on the topic I summarized the theories behind Google Sitelinks. Now I would like to look into and also to ask for your experience on what’s the real benefit from them. Many webmasters are eager to get them but do they realize why? Or is that just following the overall trend?
I managed to single out only few benefits (the happy webmaster’s feeling of pride and satisfaction was not counted):
- Your listing is clicked through more often. It is necessary to note that most surfers who see your sitelinks are already familiar with your brand because Google Sitelinks usually show up for [brand name] searches – thus they were already searching for you, so most probably they would have clicked your listing even if there had been no sitelinks whatsoever. However ‘most probably’ doesn’t mean ‘necessarily’ and the small percentage of those searching will still skip the first listing (and that’s especially important if you have items of unmanaged negative reputation somewhere in top 10) – Google sitelinks will attract attention and make that small percentage even smaller.
- Your site seems more important to an end user. Well, sounds a bit fuzzy (as I wasn’t able to spot any supporting data on this), and I am not sure (and couldn’t find any research on that) what an SEO-unsavvy person might feel when he sees Google Sitelinks. I would though agree that sitelinks make the site listing in SERPs look more trustworthy.
- People get more interested in your brand. Very often pages that are appear as sitelinks are those that give more information about you and your site (e.g. ‘About us’, ‘Contact us’, etc) – that encourages people to click through to those pages and learn more about your company. The more they learn about you, the more they will remember afterwards. If you are wise enough to make those pages interesting and provide more catchy facts about your business, you will achieve even higher brand awareness from Google sitelinks.
- You get more traffic to internal pages. If you were lucky (and smart) enough to get really important pages to show up as sitelinks, that’s a real benefit. With smart navigation and highly targeted pages generating sitelinks, this will result in better conversions, higher user satisfaction and hence more loyal visitors and customers.
Any more? Please add the sitelinks benefits I failed to notice.
Category
SEO