Sitelinks are attractive to digital marketers and business owners as they create a link to not only one, but multiple pages of a website in SERPs. Ever since Google introduced organic site links in search results, everyone in the SEO world has been debating how obtain them.
Relevance investigates the correlation between paid and organic sitelinks.
Google guidelines recommend that in order to obtain site links in organic search results, your website must be well structured, include useful information for users, have appropriate anchor text and internal links, and use alt texts that are informative and non-repetitive. This is only a guideline to improving your chances of getting sitelinks; Google cannot guarantee that following these procedures will get you sitelinks. You can, however, pay for sitelinks in your Google Adwords campaigns and it is often suggested that linking to popular pages on your website in Adwords could be a factor in organic sitelinks. So, could Adwords sitelinks influence organic ones?
If a website ranks first and second for certain keywords and the website is well structured, it will most probably gain sitelinks. If a website has sitelinks in organic search results, it will not only appear in first or second position, but will automatically take up more space in the results page. If the website also appears in Google Ads, this can also generate a higher brand awareness. Finally, even if your website does not have sitelinks you can pay to have them in your Google Adwords campaigns.
Even though Google states that Adwords has no effect on organic results, visits through paid advertising will generate more traffic and have an effect on popular pages in Analytics. More traffic to each of your pages would suggest more pages with useful information, persuading Google to create organic sitelinks for your site. In our experience, creating a successful Ad campaign with the sitelink extensions accumulates many clicks to important pages on site. These sites have subsequently gained organic sitelinks for those important pages.
Do you have an Ad campaign with sitelinks? Do you believe this has helped trigger organic sitelinks? Let us know!