Cloud Wise Joe and Co-Host Chauncey help businesses make the internet work for them, and not against them. In this episode, Joe elaborates on advice from Yoast about getting your business found online. As well, the two talk about what site links are and why they’re important to grow your business.
Joe: Welcome to the Being Found show. We are your local business guide to being found by more buying customers. If you’re not being found, then who is? And also this just happens to be the best two hours of radio for business. At least that’s what my mom, my sister, and my wife say.
Joe: So, one of the things that I got asked a lot this week and came up in research was what are site links, what are those things that show up in google results that you didn’t tell Google to show up. It might be you know you see the contact page and a category page and a Sign-Up page that are showing up under your results. And what I found a lot of people asking was hey I want that how do I set up my site to do that. And the short answer is you don’t do that but you can influence it so you can. Yeah. And so that’s what I’m going to ask you so I do want to get into a video when we come back from the break but I was curious Chauncey How do you know in two minutes or less how we can influence those things and do they matter.
Chauncey: For conversion, yes but we’ll deal with that next.
What are site links?
Sitelinks are hyperlinks to website subpages that appear under certain Google listings in order to help users navigate the site. The site owner cannot add any sitelinks ; Google adds them through its own secret automated algorithms.If you have a Google Adwords program you can create campaign and adgroup level sitelinks . Source: Wikipedia
Joe: So they do matter. And we can influence them. So we’ll get into that and then also there is very specific advice from Google and a bit of a warning. That if you make a couple mistakes, they can actually remove you from search results. This is right in their guidance. If you go to Google Webmaster blog they’re actually advising on mistakes that could be made where you actually can get your site pulled from even showing up in the search results. So we’re going to get into that and we’re going to listen to their specific advice on that in this show and then I’m going to ask Chauncey’s to decode some advice. Essentially I don’t know if you hear this a lot, Chauncey, But what I hear this kind of dire feeling from some local business is that how can we compete with the monster sites or you know how can someone find our products when some other companies you know been selling all over the place.
Where do site links come from? Joost de Valk the founder and CEO of Yoast explains and we discuss.
Joost : Well, it’s very easy. Site links are given to you. It’s not something that you can put in somewhere. Google will give you site links if it thinks you are very ‘authoritative’ for that query, so if you’re a very important result for that query. In that case, it will add site links from your site, based on how people browse your site and how they use your site.
So, it’s not something that you can change; it’s not something that you can opt-in for, it’s not something that you can do specific SEO for. You just have to become very important for that specific query. Good luck!
Joe: That video is a little contradictory. I spend my whole life on this concept of being found thinking that was contradictory. Yeah. You know and it’s I’m not sure why that is and I see why businesses get so frustrated because on one hand, you know you say one thing and then on the other hand you go oh you have it except for in this situation.
Chauncey : Yeah let me say for the audience he was basically trying to drill home that there’s nothing you can do about it but become more popular for that term which is what all of this is about. It’s like by doing what you’re supposed to be doing you can do something.
Joe: You know what are site links? and why do they matter. Just real quick. I’m going to say a little bit of why it matters when you as a user are using Google and you look for a business or something and you see that results. You know whatever it is whether it’s for big feet shoes. And then below that, you’ll see other links under that same Web site. And it might be the contact page. It might be you know a category it might be a return policy or how to use or whatever it is there are extra links. Well, you as a user typically might click on those because they tend to be popular pages for that particular site and it helps you get right to that page without having to navigate the site. So I find that businesses have two minds about this stuff.
Joe: One mind is as our own purchasing journey goes on and as we’re customers we go oh yeah I get that, I love that, I use that. But when we think about whether our business makes the same things available for their customers I don’t know and what about that. So why is it important. Well because it gets you to pages easier and customers like that. It also makes important pages more visible.
Chauncey: I mean there’s a little more importance to it than that even. It also makes people trust you. They think oh lordy look at all of this important stuff that they got at the top of Google. Now people are really thinking this but you know subconsciously they think in this which really helps conversion and click through. The other thing that it does is it takes up what we call real estate. It takes your next competitor has now been pushed all the further down the search results.
Joe: Interesting. That’s right. And that is what it’s all about is to get that real estate, isn’t it?
Chauncey: Yeah absolutely.
Joe: So what are some of the ways that you can influence this without getting too geeky. What are some of the factors that make this happen?
Chauncey: Well it’s a really good way to illustrate how SEO and marketing kind of works in general. Everybody wants to hop in let’s say I’m a lawyer and I want to rank for a lawyer. And I just got started and I’m competing with a bunch of other lawyers in town. You’re not going to do that overnight. So in the case here you basically you’re taking a niche and longer-term words but to get started with site links what you want to do is you want to optimize for your brand and by optimizing for your brand hopefully you have a unique brand name it will be all the easier there.
Joe: So if your brand name is Redding lawyer at reddinglawyer.com, you’re going to have a very hard time getting site links. So it’s easier if you have a unique name. People are still trying to key stuff word names into their business names and URL. But there’s a lot of things that go against that. So your best bet is to optimize your brand name and also site structure and interlinking to get kind of nerdy there.
Joe: That was nerdy and that’s not to guarantee anything will happen right. I mean this to me, links are one of those things that is a goal that you have so that like you said you can get that real estate you can you can be relevant you can make it easier for your customers to the important stuff.
Chauncey: Just to illustrate on the word “guarantee”, Google is not our Web site as SEO’s and as businesses, it is not our Web site. Nothing can be guaranteed if somebody guarantees you a first place position the guarantee better be a money back guarantee and not just a handshake because you cannot promise anything from somebody else’s website right.
Joe: That’s right. You know when we’re talking about them we’re really talking about all the search engines. However, Google is obviously the dominating ones. So winning their first helps you win on the others. But these are Web sites. That’s a great point. This is there is a board of directors there are investors, there are coders, and this is their website, not ours and they ultimately are deciding how they can make their customers happy.
Chauncey: Ultimately the only promises Google really makes is to their visitors who are trying to search and their promise is they’re going to try to deliver you the best results but they make no promises to anybody else and they’re very clear about right.
Joe: We are going to hear some audio from Google employees today talking about what we could do. And one of the things that I kind of noticed while I was listening to him as you know they’re being really clear about what Google things and essentially they’re saying this is what we think. And so if you would like to align yourself to think like us so that we can make our customers happy then we would be glad to share your content. However, if you are not going to make our customers happy we will not share your content.
Chauncey: Right. And so we bring that back around the site links, basically what Google wants is clear and concise branding, clearly understood page structure so you have your necessary pages like contact us, about us, the things people like to use to research you. Then interlinking you know a lot of the time people build their websites where they only link to their service pages but you might need to link more to your about pages which is very good for conversion a lot of the time you know people reading the right paragraph about you is what helps you to convert.
Listen to segment two of this show: How Google Search Works – keywords and ranking
