Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Triggering and Optimizing Rich Sitelinks
Script from the lesson The Brand SERPs Foundations Course
Jason Barnard speaking: I gave you a quick introduction to rich sitelinks in the homepage lesson here. I’m going to tell you how to trigger them if you don’t have them and how to optimize them if you do. Here are five reasons you want them.
Jason Barnard speaking: One, they’re above the fold, top, front, and center. So they are seen by everyone. They’re very, very visible and very, very important on brand SERPs.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number two, they take up a lot of real estate where you control the content. Number three, they help your audience, and sitelinks allow them to navigate straight to the page or the section that they want. That’s a good example of positive user experience.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number four, a brand that has only normal site links like this, or worse, or not at all, looks really unprofessional and unconvincing. Number five, they often kill a blue link, leaving less results on page one, and that means less for you to worry about.
Jason Barnard speaking: They’re quite easy to trigger, and yet only 50% of brands have them on their brand SERP. So you really should be aiming to have them on your brand SERP. Here are some examples.
Jason Barnard speaking: They look pretty good and take up a lot of space. This one, in particular, looks great. It’s really helpful to users searching for the brand name, and those 10 links with the descriptions take up an impressive amount of real estate, and the brand controls it.
Jason Barnard speaking: A SERP result with rich sitelinks contains about a hundred words on desktop, which is significantly better than the 25 or so you get with just the homepage, meta title and description. That’s an amazing opportunity to expand your brand message and convince right there on the brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: On mobile, you get about 15 extra words, not quite as much as on desktop, but still worth having. Here’s a couple of examples on mobile. Less impressive, but still very helpful and useful to your brands SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: And Google is making rich sitelinks even richer. Here are a couple of examples on mobile. On the left you see thumbnails with links to videos. On the right, images with links to the latest news. These sitelinks are looking pretty groovy.
Jason Barnard speaking: Google is showing them, because these two brands have incredibly rich content strategies, and that content is very relevant to their audience. Google considers that this presentation brings value to its users searching those brand names.
Jason Barnard speaking: Right now, few brands get anything more than the more traditional examples I showed before, but with a very rich content strategy, smaller brands could potentially aspire to results like these. Google’s getting more adventurous with rich site links as time goes by. They’re obviously useful to users and a great way for Google to show a variety of deeper content that allows its users to navigate quickly to the parts of the site and the type of content they want to visit.
Jason Barnard speaking: So these rich site links are fundamentally important to your brand search strategy. What you don’t want is something like this. Several things here. One, it looks very unprofessional. Two, the brand has missed an opportunity to kill a blue link and reduce the number of results it needs to optimize.
Jason Barnard speaking: Remember, the fewer results on the brand SERP, the less there is to optimize, and the less risk that anything less than perfect appears. Number three, they’re wasting a great opportunity to project a more detailed and controlled brand message, front and center right at the top. And this one. It’s even worse. No site links at all. There’s no excuse for no site links.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you’re in a situation where you have no rich site links or no site links at all, then you’re probably losing traffic to the results below, especially if they’re not results that link to sites that you control. In that case, Google ads is a temporary solution you could use. If anybody else is betting on your brand name, then the cost will be low, a few cents per click, and probably remain profitable for you.
Jason Barnard speaking: If your competitors are bidding on your brand name, then you probably should be using Google ads to reduce the leakage anyway; watch the Google ads lesson for more on that. Now, what to do.
Jason Barnard speaking: Firstly, what are the pages that typically show in rich site links? Google chooses those pages that it feels users might want to access directly, pages that are helpful and relevant to the user who just Googled your brand name.
Jason Barnard speaking: Obviously, there’s great variety, but here are some of the main candidates that you’ll want to look at and optimize: about us, contact us, careers, major product pages, category pages, FAQ section, pricing page, people profiles, especially C level employees, your blog, home page, location pages, upcoming event pages, a recent article perhaps, download pages, review pages, login pages, client support, product pages, and product category pages.
Jason Barnard speaking: Some of these pages are unimportant within your wider SEO strategy. Many brands don’t do any optimization on them at all, but in the context of your brand SERP, they take on enormous importance and they’re well worth optimizing for that.
Jason Barnard speaking: Question is, which pages will show?
Jason Barnard speaking: In the context of brand search Google is using the rich sitelinks to improve the user experience of its users. The aim is to allow that user to navigate directly to the part of your site that they want to visit, rather than going through your homepage and then your navigation system, which is potentially a bad user experience.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, Google chooses between four and 10 pages that it feels are most relevant and useful to the user according to their context. That context consists of many factors, including the geo location of the user, their search history, the type of device, and the historical data from the pool of searches on your brand’s name.
Jason Barnard speaking: Some examples of context. On mobile. Google might choose a page specifically for downloading a mobile app. Whereas it wouldn’t do that for desktop. If the user is geo located near a specific outlet, Google might choose the page that represents that shop. If the user searches the brand name very regularly, Google might be more inclined to show the Login and client support pages because it will imagine you’re a client.
Jason Barnard speaking: So bear in mind that you need to have a variety of pages that Google can use to cover as many user-specific contexts as possible.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, influencing which sitelinks appear. Unfortunately, you have no direct control. All you can do is influence it. Encourage Google to show the pages you prefer. The following tips and tricks will help ensure that most of the site links that show are those you prefer, but you’ll never be 100% successful since Google shows those that it thinks are relevant and useful to the user in their specific context.
Jason Barnard speaking: Optimization techniques. For any pages that have a specific type in Schema.org such as AboutPage, ContactPage, ItemPage, ProfilePage, add that markup and that will help them to appear more regularly. It doesn’t guarantee that they will appear more regularly, but it reinforces Google’s understanding by indicating explicitly the role of each of those pages. That will encourage Google to show them as sitelinks more often, and that will help enormously with the stability of the sitelinks and the predictability of what will appear when somebody searches your brand name.
Jason Barnard speaking: A second trick is siloing. When content is logically organized in vertical silos or in folders, it’s easy for Google to deal with. Many of the best candidates for sitelinks are pages that can be grouped together in a silo or folder called “Our company”. Do that. Put pages such as about us contact us, C level employees, profile pages, careers, and so on, in a folded together – Company. You also want to group pages for existing clients in a similar manner if you can.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now pages that are only used in sitelinks. Some of the pages that appear as sitelinks in brand SERPs, such as login, contact us or about us are not used in your wider SEO strategy, and so usually don’t appear in other SERPs for other keywords. You can focus on making those pages perfect for their role as site links on your brand SERP. For other pages that you do use in your wider SEO strategy, such as product pages, category pages, blog articles, event pages, and so on, that drive traffic should continue to be optimized for that. It really isn’t possible to optimize for both at the same time.
Jason Barnard speaking: Don’t kill moneymaking traffic for the sake of a slightly better rich sitelink. If you provide a quality meta title and description, the sitelink will always look pretty good. Just bear in mind that they may well appear as your sitelink on your brand SERP at some point when you’re writing those meta titles and descriptions.
Jason Barnard speaking: Here are some tips for those pages that appear only as site links. Meta titles.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now might not directly influence whether or not Google uses a page as a sitelink, but it influences what is displayed when they are used. For all sitelink candidates, make sure you have written an appropriate meta title. You have control. Use that control. Don’t rely on your CMS to choose one for you.
Jason Barnard speaking: Here are the rules for the meta title.
Jason Barnard speaking: It should be short and to the point. There isn’t much space in sitelink titles, less than 30 characters. If the Meta title you give is too long, Google will shorten it. And what displays probably won’t be quite what you would like.
Jason Barnard speaking: It should indicate clearly what the person will find on that page. For each page stay focused on what that page offers a user who already knows who you are.
Jason Barnard speaking: In the meta title don’t wax lyrical about your brand. In the context of your brand SERP, the sitelink will appear in a very brand-specific context underneath your homepage and surrounded by other information about you. There’s no need to re-explain who you are, what it is you do, what your USP is, or repeat your brand name. That information is already in the SERP potentially multiple times already. You can include your brand name in the meta title, but don’t weave it into the sentence. Add it at the end of the title so that Google can remove it if it doesn’t feel it’s pertinent.
Jason Barnard speaking: The meta description is incredibly important. Make sure that you always have a meta description on these pages. If you don’t have one, Google will choose a description from the page that it thinks is relevant, and Google doesn’t always make the best choice here. If you provide the meta description, it will usually show that, but also once again, don’t rely on your CMS to choose one either. Control your brand message by writing a specific meta description for each of these pages. Remember, this will display above the fold, front and center just below your home page in full sight for everyone who Googles your brand name. As with the meta title, keep it short, simple, and focused on what the page offers. And think about the context.
Jason Barnard speaking: The users search for your brand, and the SERP is full of information about your brand, and your brand name appears multiple times, so don’t overdo it.
Jason Barnard speaking: Content of these pages.
Jason Barnard speaking: Right at the top of each of these pages include a clear explanation of what the user will find on that page. A text that describes the role of the page. That will help the user, but also encourage Google to show it as a sitelink more often.
Jason Barnard speaking: In the main copy on the page, only provide the information that is necessary for the person who is interested in that specific aspect of your brand. For example, within the context of a search on your brand name, your about us page needs to explain who you are and why they would want to do business with you. The contact us page only needs to describe how they can contact you. A pricing page should be dominated by the actual pricing information. You’re writing for somebody who knows who you are and they are informing themselves about a specific aspect of your brand.
Jason Barnard speaking: You’re not in heavy sales mode here. Don’t be pushy. Don’t oversell. You can, and indeed you should include upsells and links to information about your products and services in the sidebar or underneath the content.
Jason Barnard speaking: Excluding pages.
Jason Barnard speaking: There are some pages that you might want to exclude. Previously through search console, Google allows site owners to specify pages they wanted to exclude, but it removed that as a possibility in 2018. Today, in order to instruct Google that you don’t want it to use a page, you need to “no-index” it.
Jason Barnard speaking: Just be aware of two things. One, this will also exclude them from other search results. Two, no-index is not a hundred percent effective, since Google can choose to use pages, even when they contain that piece of code.
Jason Barnard speaking: I advise you to no-index the legal pages, privacy policy, terms of use, etc, etc, since those are really not interesting for your audience in the context of a Google search. You might also want the search box.
Jason Barnard speaking: Before getting too excited, it’s important to realize that Google will only add it to the brand SERP if it feels that being able to search your site from Google will be helpful to its users. So if you only have a few pages, that’s unlikely to be the case. You probably won’t get the search box if you have a small site. If you have a lot of pages, then you can expect Google to add it. It looks really professional and gives you an extra bit of space on that SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: Here’s an example of a fully-owned brand site block.
Jason Barnard speaking: One way to look at this is that Google adds the search box when it thinks that the site has so many pages that would be useful for direct access for the user, that the rich site links aren’t enough. Adding the search box, semi-solves this problem.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you want a search box, you need to put this code in your pages. Google won’t add the search box immediately. Wait for a few days. If it isn’t showing the search box, then there is nothing you can do to change that. But it might start using the search box in the future, so leave the code in place.
Jason Barnard speaking: At this point, you’ve got a great meta title and meta description. Your homepage is wonderful, and you’ve triggered and optimized the rich site links, and you might also have the search box. Your site controls about a quarter of the brand SERP, and that’s equivalent to three results. That’s your brand message controlled by you, top front and center, showing to people who matter to your business. Thank you.
