Google Ads has many useful tools and functions in addition to regular search ads. Formerly known as extensions, these assets can help users better understand your product or service. They can also ensure you stand out from the competition and get more valuable real estate in the search engine results page (SERPs). This article will discuss how to properly and effectively use sitelinks and landing pages within Google Ads.
Effectively Using Sitelinks
One of the most used functions when creating ads is typically sitelinks. Sitelinks are hyperlinks to a website’s internal page. These hyperlinks appear under Google search ads to help users better navigate the site. Typically, they are misused, easily leading to missed opportunities within a campaign.
Why Are Sitelinks Valuable to Your Campaign?
There are a few reasons why sitelinks are valuable. First, they will significantly help drive conversions when implemented correctly. When a user surfs the web, they are provided with pertinent links under the text ad, meaning their initial search intent is fulfilled. A higher search intent usually leads to better rates.
Secondly, sitelinks allow you to get more real estate on the SERPs. This will help your ad stand out more against competitors and other listings. In other words, you’re getting more of the reader’s attention without paying more for it.
Finally, since sponsored ads pop up first on any search engine’s page, users often scroll through them to go directly to the organic results. But having the added real estate in the SERPs also provides a higher chance of fulfilling the user’s search intent. This also increases your chance of people clicking or tapping on your ad. In a sense, Google provides a sense of legitimacy to ads with sitelinks since they stand out more than the rest.
Will Sitelinks Increase the Cost of My Campaigns?
Another important factor to consider when enabling this function is that sitelinks do not drive up your cost-per-click. This function adds value to the overall user experience and helps our ad take up more space without having to pay more for that extra real estate space.
How Many Sitelinks Should I Include?
Relevant sitelinks allow users to easily digest information on a website, which can help increase the click-through rate (CTR) by 10% to 15% on average. But this doesn’t mean Google will show 10 sitelinks under an ad. Instead, depending on how relevant the ad is to the user, plus the ad score and the quality score, Google will show anywhere between 2 and 6 sitelinks at a time. This means that when you build your ad, you should include no less than 6 sitelinks. If you’re pressed by time or don’t have enough internal pages on your site, you can use fewer sitelinks, but never use less than four.
Where Should Sitelinks Take the User?
We’ve mentioned relevancy and search intent a few times in this article. These two are key to improving CTR and conversion rates. Let’s illustrate this with an example: Let’s say your campaign is about a vintage car auction. Your sitelinks should be catered to relevant information on the website. This could include what cars are up for auction, where the auction is taking place, how long the auction will last, and the best place for prospective buyers to contact someone for more information.
In this hypothetical case, some of the sitelinks could include “Vintage Car inventory,” “Our Location,” “Last Year’s Auction,” and “Contact Us.” Your sitelinks should not include information that is not relevant to the campaign.
This brings up the important issue of applying account-level sitelinks. Do not include account-level sitelinks if your campaigns differ in intent. For instance, if you are an auction house and you are auctioning both vintage cars and vintage motorcycles, you most likely should have two separate campaigns. Each campaign should then have its own sitelinks, even though some may or may not be repeated. Back to our original example, both “Our Location” and “Contact Us” sitelinks could be repeated, but you would want to replace “Vintage Car Inventory” with “Vintage Bike Inventory” or the like to ensure their relevancy.
Can I Use Sitelinks if I Only Have a Landing Page or a One-Pager?
The use of sitelinks allows you to direct users to internal pages within your site that have content relevant to the user’s search query. The main issue with this approach is that once a person lands on a site, they may not necessarily convert. That’s why pay-per-click (PPC) professionals recommend the use of specific landing pages. These are where the conversion actions are clearly defined, and the user has the option of either converting or exiting the page versus visiting other pages on the site or interacting with the content.
But this poses yet another problem. Google does now allow sitelinks to have the same URL, which a single landing page usually has. In other words, your different sitelinks cannot have the same URL (i.e., landing.example.com) for each of the sitelinks.
One way to overcome this is to create anchor links. This can be done by selecting a section of your page and sending the traffic to that specific section. For example, let’s say your landing page has several sections: the main banner or “hero,” “why choose us,’, “about us,” “testimonials,” and “contact us.” With this method, each section becomes its own unique URL and bypasses Google’s limitation of using different URLs for each sitelink. In reality, each sitelink looks something like this: landing.example.com/#name-of-section-1; landing.example.com/#name-of-section-2; and so on.
In Summary
Sitelinks help drive conversions which are pivotal for making an ad campaign profitable. They are great for taking up real estate space on SERPs, which help your ad stand out more against your competitors and other listings. Relevant sitelinks not only help users easily digest information, but they provide users a sense of legitimacy when viewing our ads. Always remember that a minimum of 4 sitelinks are required within your ad. Most importantly, your sitelinks must be catered toward campaign-specific information. Otherwise, you run the risk of sending users to sections of a website where they are less likely to convert.
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