This week Google announced the roll out of enhanced sitelinks. The Gospel of Google has long preached that sitelinks increase click through rate, and this latest announcement comes with the prediction that enhanced sitelinks will provide an even larger improvement on the previous hike in CTR. An increase to the increase, if you will. And when it comes to CTR, we most definitely will.
The enhancement allows sitelinks to show ads already in your account that are closely related to the links. The Google blog post explains this clearly so check it out for their pizza-centric example. It struck your humble news updater as conceptually similar to the turducken. Instead of a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey, it’s just ads and ads all appearing underneath your main ad. So, not as fun as a turducken and the mental image of John Madden’s grease smeared face ripping one apart, but still very fun.
Based on the intel out there this automatically goes into effect if you qualify, so the trick to increasing your increases rests in making sure you qualify. Follow these steps:
- Sitelinks extensions need to be enabled.
- Your ad must appear above Google search results (regular old sitelinks can also appear beneath the results – not these guys/gals {they have higher standards, apparently})
- You have to have sitelinks that are closely related to ads in your account so that Google knows to put them together. Lunametrics has some great advice on this step.
If you aren’t using sitelinks yet, you should. And now you can spend a lot of time making those sitelinks even better so that they can show up as enhanced. Where’s the fun in a turkey all by itself? Stuff that turkey with other birds, yo.
