The Climb, step 13
How We're Earning Our Reward
Step 12 explained what the reward is and what Google wants to see before it hands it over. This step is the worked example: the homework we did on onraistudio.com so Google has no reason left to hold the reward back. If you have your own site, you can copy this checklist directly.
Why this matters
We audited Onrai Studio against the five things Google wants to see before it rewards you with sitelinks, fixed what was missing, and wrote it up. The work is small, technical, and mostly boring, but skipping any one of these is enough to keep your search result stuck as a single blue link.
How we audited the site
We took each of the five Step 12 signals (brand search, nav structure, link text, URL shape, and sitemap/titles) and walked through the whole site asking "is this true for us, and if not, what's the smallest fix?" Four of the five were already in good shape from earlier chapters of The Climb. One had a real gap.
What we checked, and what we changed
- 1
Signal 1: Do we own our own brand search?
This is Step 02's job, and it's already in motion. "Onrai" is unique enough that Google has nothing to confuse us with. No change needed, but this is the gate everything else sits behind. Without Step 02, Google would never consider handing over the reward.
- 2
Signal 2: Is our nav small, stable, and descriptive?
We checked the navbar: Services, Packages, Portfolio, AI, About, The Climb, plus a "Get a Quote" button. That's six items inside Google's recommended 5–7 range, every label is a real word (no icons, no acronyms), and we haven't reshuffled it in months. No change needed, but worth double-checking the next time someone wants to add a seventh menu item.
- 3
Signal 3: Are our internal links written like sentences?
We grep'd the whole codebase for link text like "click here", "read more", "learn more", and "more →". Zero hits in actual UI. Every internal link on the site already describes where it goes ("See our work", "Read the Elusive Racing case study", "Get a quote"). Google treats those phrases as the candidate text for future sitelinks, so this matters more than it looks.
- 4
Signal 4: Are our URLs readable and logical?
We listed every route: /, /services, /packages, /portfolio, /portfolio/elusive-racing, /ai, /about, /the-climb, /the-climb/12-earn-google-sitelinks, /contact. No query strings, no IDs like ?page=42, no random hashes. A human can read any URL and guess what's on the page.
- 5
Signal 5: Is the sitemap up to date and are titles unique?
This is where we found the gap, and it's the kind of thing that stops Google handing over the reward. We'd just added Steps 12 and 13 to The Climb, but public/sitemap.xml hadn't been updated, so Google had no way to discover them. We added both new URLs with today's lastmod and resubmitted the sitemap in Search Console. We also walked every <title> tag in the pages folder and confirmed they're all unique and descriptive (e.g. "Packages: What You Get at Every Tier | Onrai Studio").
The same checklist for your site
If you want to earn the same reward on your own site, here's the audit in order. Most small business sites pass the first four and fail the fifth: the sitemap is almost always stale, and that alone is enough to hold the reward back.
- Search your brand name on Google. Are you the #1 result for it? If not, finish Step 02 first.
- Open your site and count your top-nav items. Five to seven is the sweet spot. More than that, trim it.
- Check that every nav label is a real, descriptive word (not an icon, abbreviation, or jargon term).
- Search your codebase (or page source) for "click here", "read more", and "more". Replace each one with text that describes the destination.
- Walk through your URLs. Are they readable like a sentence (/services/web-design) or messy (/page?id=42)? Fix the messy ones with redirects.
- Open your sitemap.xml in a browser. Does it list every page that should be public? Are the dates recent? If not, regenerate it and resubmit it in Search Console.
- Open every public page and check the <title> tag. Each one should be unique, descriptive, and end with your brand name.
Each item is small. Together they get Google to hand over the reward within a few weeks of its next big crawl.
Claiming the reward
This audit doesn't instantly upgrade our search result. Google still has to recrawl, re-evaluate, and decide. But it removes every excuse Google had for withholding the reward. Over the next few weeks, every signal we cleaned up makes the sitelinks upgrade more likely. The point is to stop hiding a clean, well-structured site behind a sloppy sitemap, so Google can give you what you've already earned.
