Like most advertisers, we always make sure our Adwords accounts have sitelinks added into our campaigns; as they are great for promoting specific pages of your website.
We’ve found that using sitelinks for promoting best-selling products or highlighting beneficial pages of a website (i.e. contact us, about us, etc.) to be quite successful. As it shows people what else your site offers, as well as giving them easy access to informative pages to help with their search queries.
There are many ways to create great sitelinks, see below for our do’s and don’ts:
Keep them short and sweet
There are up to 25 characters in the title and 35 characters for each description line, which is more than enough for a sitelink. But that doesn’t mean that you have to fill out all the spaces.
At the end of the day, you want people to click on these links and visit your site; so make sure you aren’t using too much information.
Don’t forget about them
It’s easy to forget to monitor the sitelinks once you’ve made them; so it’s always important to review their performance. Check to see if they are gaining enough impressions, the CTR is above 1% and the conversion rates are high.
Anything that indicates a bad sitelink, would need to be either removed or optimised for the future.
Make them relevant to your campaign
There’s nothing worse than having irrelevant sitelinks, as they need to be related to the product/service that you’re promoting in your campaign. For example, if you have a campaign selling ladies shoes, your sitelinks should feature other products related to this, i.e. high heels, sandals, walking shoes, trainers, etc.
You would be promoting other products which are related to the campaign, which will benefit your overall CTR and conversion rate. And giving people more specific options to help them decide on the product that’s right for them.
Follow Google ad policies
As an advertising agency, we are fully aware of Google’s ad policies. We have to make sure all our ads, keywords and ad extensions meet the requirements; so we avoid being disapproved by Google.
Things you should be aware of when creating sitelinks:
Link text repetition – Reusing link text is not allowed, even if the sitelink is being sent to a different destination; so ensure all your sitelinks are unique.
Duplicate URLs – You aren’t allowed to point sitelinks to the same landing page or content. Ensure you are sending each sitelink to its own page.
Punctuation and symbols – Google will not allow exclamation marks or any form of excessive punctuation; due to it serving no purpose other than drawing attention to the ad.