The Google Sitelinks were a welcome addition to the SERPs. They initially only appeared for brand searches and it gave webmasters a nice increase in their share of the space above the fold.
The Sitelinks are generated algorithmically and the results are usually a mixture of primary pages with a few bizarre additions.
Looking at the Sitelinks for Amazon.co.uk’s homepage as an example, Google has selected a majority of primary links but also one specific product, Skechers Womens Shape Ups Trainer.
In most cases, webmasters simply look at the selection and make decisions about which ones they think are irrelevant. In the Amazon example, the Skechers link stands out but the remaining selection of primary links may not be optimal.
There is a more systematic way to optimise your selection of Sitelinks using data from your analytics package. By analysing the number of times each Sitelink is clicked and the resulting bounce rates and even conversions, you can experiment with alternatives to narrow down to the selection which provides the greatest overall value to your users.
All you need is to be able to view landing page data for specific keyword searches. This feature is available in Google Analytics which I will use for this example but this can replicated in your favourite analytics package.
A note of caution, if you have also have a double listing in the SERPs for your brand term, it’s likely that this second listing will generate entries which will corrupt your data. Usually the choice for your second listing is one of your main pages and probably won’t be one you want to remove from your Sitelinks so it isn’t necessarily a huge problem.
Google Analytics segmentation isn’t particularly accurate although it’s good enough for this kind of optimisation work providing you have a site with lots of data. If you want more accurate data then you can set up a custom profile to track keywords and landing pages. We’ll cover this in another post in the future.