Friday Factoid: Search Sitelinks

Digital Strategy and Enablement

4,000,000 Google search queries are made every minute of every day. (Source)

93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. (Source)

75% of search engine users never scroll past the first page. (Source)

Search marketing is the process of gaining traffic and visibility to online properties from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts, and optimizing or directing traffic once it reaches a destination website.

There are three components of online search: paid, earned and owned.

  • ‘Paid’ includes banner ads and keywords we, our partners, or competitors buy in an online real-time auction to attract attention and traffic.
  • ‘Earned’ focuses on the organic results displayed in a search results page, influenced by how well we write, organize, and tag our content.
  • ‘Owned’ search refers to the search box on Cisco.com and the results page it generates when users search within Cisco.com.  

Search sitelinks are a subset of links in search results that provide shortcuts to help users navigate a site, allowing them to quickly find the information they want.

Cisco utilizes search sitelinks (or Information Boxes as we refer to them) to improve the user experience and enable the visitor to quickly get where they are going. We create and maintain the information boxes on Cisco.com and control what information (sitelinks) is displayed in them when the user searches on a particular keyword.

View two examples of Google search results and of Cisco search results.

Cisco search sitelinks (Information Box) highlights:

  • 176 total information boxes on Cisco.com search
  • 30.7% trigger rate for March 2015 – trigger rate is the number of times that an information box is displayed based on keyword searched – these are great results since nearly one-third of searches on Cisco.com trigger an information box!
  • 18% click to chat conversation rate as a result of visitors starting on a sitelink
  • 1.2M searches on Cisco.com for March 2015
  • 55% search results click-through rate to a Cisco site

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