Running out of Ideas for Sitelinks? Here are 20 More Suggestions for You to Try

By Brad

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Ads, General

Sitelinks are one of your most visible ad extensions. As this extension can link to any page on your domain or any page about your company, on your site or even on another website, there are a lot of creative ways to use sitelinks. In this article, we’ll look through some of our favorite uses.

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Contact: If you are focused on lead generation and ensuring your company is easy to contact, linking directly to a contact/inquiry page can help showcase that you are easy to get in touch with as well as increasing leads.

Our story: In a world where more people are conscious of brands and their beliefs and stories, linking directly to a story about the company helps to humanize your company.

White paper download: If you’re in an industry where a lot of research is needed, showcasing your whitepapers can help share your research, show that you are an industry leader who publishes papers, and if you gate the content, give you some more emails to help you reach back to users interested in your content.

Buying guides: There are many industries where it can be complicated to buy a product. From TVs to high-end stoves to air conditioners, choosing the right one for you is crucial as you’ll have the product for a long time and they are often not cheap purchases.  Show that you are willing to help people research and find the perfect product fit for them by linking to buying guides where users can easily understand how to evaluate and purchase a product.

Segmenting B2B and B2C: We’re still not sure when someone searches for ‘accounting services’ if they want a business accountant, a personal accountant, or something else. If you offer both B2B & B2C services or products, you don’t need to ignore the search terms where you can’t figure out what a user wants – use your sitelinks to help users self select into their segment.

Segmenting business types: Do you offer small business, medium business, and enterprise business plans? Maybe your industry crosses three different industry types. In these cases, you can use your sitelinks to help showcase the differences in your offers and push users directly to the kind of content and industry plans for which they are searching.

Upsell: Are you trying to get users to buy that extended warranty with their product? Maybe you want them to buy a pair of shoes and a tie that matches that expensive suit. Showcasing upsells in your sitelinks, especially when combined with audiences who purchased a specific product type, can help increase your total sales.

Cross-sell: Along with upsells, if you know someone just bought a product, subscribed to your SAAS product where you have complementary products, or booked your service – you can use sitelinks to cross-sell into other services. This combines well with RLSAs or different audience targeting options.

Locations:  While the location extension is useful if the user is searching from their starting point, we have all done searches at work where we intended to visit the place on the weekend. If you have a few locations, showing the options in your sitelinks can help show users other options. This is especially true for people traveling to an area. If you’re a hotel with a downtown and a beach location, show the users some travel options.

Loyalty reminders:  We’re big fans of using the if/default ads to switch ad copy around for our loyal members. However, sometimes you don’t know a user is a loyal member, or you want to showcase your loyalty system to people who aren’t fans yet. When you are trying to bring new attention to an offer, sitelinks are a useful place to showcase that information.

Schedule an appointment: Do you take appointments in advance? From car repair shops to dining reservations to custom shopping experiences, users often know the end result is booking an appointment. Save the user some time by linking directly to your appointments page in your ad. This can help increase conversions while making life easier on the searchers.

Special events in store: From book readings to children’s hour to custom cooking workshops to how-to/DIY classes, many businesses have in-store events. Showcase those events in your sitelinks, especially on brand terms, to get more users to attend your events and wander into your location.

Upcoming online events: Not all events take place in a store. Are you running a webinar, virtual conference, live YouTube chat, or something else? Use your sitelinks to increase the event’s visibility and get more users to attend your virtual events.

Pricing Tiers: When you are searching for a diamond ring, are you prepared to pay $10,000 or $500? Do you want a $5,000 TV set or a $500 one? When you are trying to set pricing tiers across products, SAAS, or other areas if the price extension is too inflexible for you – using sitelinks that can be more customized than the price extension can help segment users to the proper part of your site and anchor your pricing structure.

Clarifying ambiguous terms:  When someone searches for a ‘dress,’ do they mean: evening dress, wedding dress, prom dress, casual dress, sundress, or something else? Sitelinks are one of the best ways to segment users when they are searching for ambiguous terms.  This pairs well with the structured snippet of ‘types’ to even further list out the clarifying information to show you have that type on your website.

Social follows: Do you want more social follow, users to see your YouTube videos or like your Facebook page? Sitelinks can link to pages that are not on your website within some specific guidelines:

While links should normally point to the same domain as the ad URL, we do allow links to point to third-party sites, under limited circumstances. Some examples include links to select online retailers, a Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube video, LinkedIn profile, or Instagram account. In such cases, the link text must be descriptive of what someone would find at the link destination. For example, “Watch our YouTube video” should lead to your video on YouTube. Source.

Subscribe to blog/email/etc: We put a lot of effort into the articles we write, emails we send out, and our content in general. We want people to find it useful and read it. Making it useful is on us to produce excellent content. Making sure people read it is about marketing. Adding subscription options in your sitelinks can make sure more people are reading your wonderful content.

Any special sales: Everyone loves a deal. Do you have items on clearance, running a liquidation sale,  or have some other upcoming specials and sales? Put them in sitelinks to make sure people know about the sale.

New Arrivals/Offers: Gaining traction for brand new items can be difficult. Showcase either your new items page or even new items in your sitelinks. Every time Samsung releases a new phone, it is a sitelink for some of their brand terms. Google follows suit and a search for ‘Google Phones’ or ‘Android Phones’ shows the latest item in Sitelinks.

Upcoming events you’ll be attending/speaking:  In a digital world, people still love to connect in person. If you’re attending events, speaking at events, exhibiting and an event, then show it off with your sitelinks. These sitelinks might be only targeted to the region where the event is taking place or connected to your brand or the name of the event to make more people to people connections.

While sitelinks are essential, they are just one of many ad extensions. Be sure that you are using all of the ad extensions. We’ve put together a handy chart on the minimum number of extensions you should be using.

In addition, you should audit your ad extensions to ensure you have full coverage.

Being creative with sitelinks can help bring a lot of additional visibility to your ad and ensure users see your company as a unique and useful brand. Be sure to test them and see what combinations of ads and ad extensions bring you the most qualified traffic that helps you reach your marketing goals.

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