Google is constantly finding ways to make search easier and more relevant to the user. The latest updates to the user interface demonstrate Google’s confidence in its ability to identify brands, stores, and type related searches.

With these new changes to the SERP, site owners have a new opportunity to improve their user engagement and garner more traffic.

One of these recent changes to search results is an extended breakdown of site links for a branded keyword. For instance, searching “Tiffany & Co.” yields tiffany.com as the top organic result, but the SERP also includes direct links to different parts of Tiffany’s website. This may lead to more entrances on deeper pages, and it places an increased importance on internal link architecture. If done improperly, these site link results could lead to increased bounce rates, so it is important to create a fluid navigational structure and control which site links are being shown in the SERPs. As always, you can give Google your input on how these internal results are displayed and labeled via Google Webmaster Tools.

In their first instance, all expanded internal site links will not be labeled with their title tags, but with the topic/category keywords that Google finds most relevant for, or, most powerful from those pages. This could have a significant impact on click-through rates for organic results as well as PPC.

To gain the most from these “super site links”, brands should try to get their highest converting and most trafficked pages in this expanded list and capitalize on the likely increase in click on paid ads for these SERPs by bidding on competitor brands. If you’re worried about the brand hijacking implications, and it’s legality, don’t, Wisconsin says it’s cool. Because of free speech. And if you have any questions about this post, please leave a comment below, or tweet me!

Thanks,
Evan