Enhanced Google Sitelinks Provides More Exposure in Search Results

Well, at this point unless you’ve lived under a rock, the fact that Google announces another change shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, the search giant likes to keep users and SEO companies on their toes with regular changes and updates. This time the search mogul is sending search marketing agencies into overdrive securing the best possible Sitelinks listings for their client’s sites.

More Real Estate Makes for Clarity

With the updates to Google’s Sitelinks, search marketing agencies will see huge improvements and even bigger opportunities for their clients. Along with increasing the number of Sitelinks available from 8 links to 12, Google is making Sitelinks far more user friendly.

They’ve increased the size of the text that appears and much like a regular search result; the URL is highlighted in green. In addition to getting a highlighted link, these listings also have a one line snippet describing the page, which they did not have before. This update will ultimately make an entire site more visible to the searcher by increasing the number of search results and can lead to increases in organic traffic from Google.

Here’s an example of SmartSearch Marketing’s listing in Google with Enhanced Sitelinks:

More Site To See

Perhaps the biggest improvement with this latest upgrade is that Google Sitelinks help searchers identify the important pages on websites and provides direct access to these pages. The main search result and link will clearly be above the Sitelinks but now Google will match the query with the most relevant pages from the site to display below in order of relevance.

With 13 possible pages to choose from, there is huge potential for increased click through rates for those top ranking sites. Furthermore, searchers can get directly to the information they want which can also increase conversion rates. From an SEO standpoint this increases both the volume and quality of the search traffic.

Search Marketing Agencies Have Control

This upgrade gets even better for search marketing agencies, because they now have more control over placement of Google’s Sitelinks. By using their Google Webmaster Tools account, search engine marketing agencies can now suggest demotions to any URL appearing in the Sitelinks. While agencies cannot select the pages displayed, they can clean up the results by demoting those pages that are not ideal for the search results.

Search Engine Marketing Agencies Take Advantage

This new upgrade from Google has the user in mind and can be extremely beneficial if search engine marketing agencies take advantage. They now have a new landscape with increased prime real estate in the search results. By paying close attention to a site’s architecture and webmaster tools, search marketing agencies can take advantage of the new opportunity Google has provided.