This week Google has introduced an improvement to the Sitelinks feature that appears when searchers type in an “exact match” search for a business or brand.

An exact match is when a searcher types in the name of the business, group, brand or person they are looking for. You may have seen in the past, when conducting an exact match search that Google would show Sitelinks to additional pages on the site as well as the websites’ main entry at the top of the organic results.

Sitelinks are the two columns of links that appear under some search results that are designed to help users easily navigate deeper into a site. Sitelinks haven’t changed fundamentally: they’re still generated and ranked algorithmically based on the link structure of a site, and they’ll only appear if useful for a particular query.

Google have now taken this one step further, in exact match searches, where Google are totally confident they know what the user is looking for, they are now dedicating a large portion of the front page to just the one site, displaying links and extra information about the website they believe the user is looking for.

This is great news in terms of SEO, especially for businesses who can grow the number of people searching for the name of their company or brand.

Below is an example of how the exact match searches look, taken from a search I carried out for “Science Museum London” – CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE.