How to Get More Clickable Links inside your Search Snippet

There is an interesting conclusion to draw from email marketing: The more clickable links you have in your email, the more clicks you get. Internet users have become accustomed to click on something that looks like a link.

The same principle applies to Google’s search snippets. The only difference is that you can’t directly input which links and design their appearance on a search results page (SERP). However, you can improve your odds of having more clickable links in your search snippet via two methods.

Create On-Page Clickable Table of Contents

Start by looking at “Jump to” links inside a search snippet. These take you right to the part of the page with the information you’re searching for. Google’s “Jump to” link contains a “named anchor” HTML element that identifies a part of the document.

You can add these to your page either manually or by using plugins:

• Do it manually by creating anchor links for fast navigation. This method requires a bit of expertise with SEO or coding, but you have full control over how you name your anchors and links for better results.
• Alternatively, you can use a WordPress plugin like Easy Table of Contents. Automatically add a clickable, named-anchor table of contents to each article based on H2 and H3 subheads.

Get More Words in Bold in your Search Snippet

Utilizing the bold font can highlight important keywords within your content. Within search snippets, Google highlights certain phrases in bold to help users choose the best-suited result. You can include more words with a bold font to help it stand out.

Here’s how you can ensure that more words are highlighted in bold in your search snippets:

Use your target query strategically.

Google will bold the query or part of the query that the user typed into the search engine. The obvious solution is to use your target words in your content more than once to give Google more opportunities to generate a search snippet with those words in bold. Note that this is not about keyword density, a concept that is less relevant in today’s searches.

Strategic keyword usage means using your targeted phrases in key places around your webpage or content to ensure search crawlers and human readers instantly get a glimpse of them upon landing on the page.

Some places to include your target query:

• Headline
• URL
• First Paragraph
• Subheadings

Use related terms and synonyms.

Google’s algorithm does not rely on exact keyword matching anymore. Now the algorithm understands the context of the search query. Particularly, Google understands closely related words as well as synonyms, which they often highlight in search results.

Since Google’s algorithm is built to serve search answers to its users, aiming for human-readable form is the way to go. You are likely doing this already without realizing it. Good writers use varied vocabulary and include synonyms and concepts without thinking about click-through optimization.

Nonetheless, being more strategic about it will help you on creating better, in-depth content, improving your organic rankings, and increasing your click-through rate (CTR).