DANIEL WAISBERG: Hi, I'm Daniel Waisberg,
Search Advocate at Google.
And, in this video, I'll discuss a few best practices
for governments and authority entities
to make information more visible on Google Search.
Many times, the advice is similar to the advice
we give to other websites, but I'll
try to focus on what's most relevant to you.
I'll discuss three topics--
optimizing your site appearance on Google Search,
making sure Google can find and index your pages, and analyzing
queries that you're ranking for and queries that you're not.
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Let's start with some search engine optimization
basics you should implement on your site.
These are best practices to optimize your content
appearance and findability on Google Search.
Create unique, accurate page titles.
A title tag in your page HTML tells both users and search
engines what the topic of a particular page is.
When your page appears in a search result,
the content of the title tag may appear prominently
in the search results snippet.
So it should be both short and informative.
If the title is too short, too long, or otherwise deemed less
relevant, Google may show only a portion of it
or one that's automatically generated.
Google may also show different titles, depending
on user queries or devices.
Use the description method tag.
A description method tag in your HTML page
gives Google a summary of what the page is about.
While the title should be only a few words or a short phrase,
the description may be as long as a paragraph.
Description method tags are important because Google
might use them as snippets for your pages.
So make sure to write a description that
will both inform and interest the users.
Use heading tags to emphasize important things.
Use meaningful headings throughout your content
to indicate important topics and create
the hierarchical structure for your pages.
These will make it easier for users and search engines
to navigate through your content,
especially if your pages are very long.
Improve site navigation with internal links.
Government websites usually provide
guidance on multiple subjects to a broad audience.
This can make it hard for users and search engines
to understand where to find content
and what is most important.
To help with that, first, make it easy for users
to distinguish between regular text and links.
You don't want users to miss the links.
And, second, use descriptive text in the links.
This will help users and Google understand
what the link pages are about.
In addition, your site's information hierarchy
will help make it clear what is most important
and how to navigate between sections.
You should start by making sure the site navigation menu has
all the important sections, and, also,
by providing bread crumbs on the top of your pages.
Add structured data to your pages.
Structured data is code that you can
add to your pages to describe your content to search engines.
Google uses this information to display your content
in useful ways, such as with results.
There's several types of structured data
governments can potentially use.
Here are three ideas--
Frequently Asked Questions or FAQs
for pages providing information on areas where users might have
recurring questions, how-to for pages
where you have step-by-step guidance on how to do something
like getting a certificate, a visa, or a permit,
and breadcrumbs to help describe how your website is organized.
For more best practices, check the SEO starter guide
linked in the description.
It's long, but it can be a valuable resource.
After optimizing the content, make sure that Google can find
and index your pages.
This can be easily uncovered using the index coverage
report.
Log into Search Console, and find the report in the sidebar.
When you open it, the default view
shows a summary of indexing errors on your website.
Click to show valid with warnings,
valid, and excluded pages too.
Here's what each status means.
Errors prevent pages from being indexed.
Pages with errors won't appear in Google,
which can mean a loss of traffic to your website.
Valid with warnings are pages that may or may not
be shown on Google, depending on the issue,
but we think there is a problem that you should look into.
Valid pages have been indexed and can
be shown on Google Search.
Excluded pages were not indexed and won't appear in Google,
but either we think that is your intention,
or we think it's the right thing to do.
Clicking a row in the table will lead you
to a more detailed report, showing examples
of pages that are affected and provide more information
on the issue.
Here you can also grab a link using the Share button
to share the details with a developer that can perform
code changes to your website.
After you or your developer have fixed the error,
click Validate Fix, and Google will validate your changes.
You can watch the index coverage episode
in this series to understand more about the issues affecting
your site and learn how to validate
the fix you have implemented.
To help search engines discover all your content,
it's very useful to tell them which pages, images, and videos
to crawl on your website.
This is done by submitting a sitemap.
If you have a sitemap, you can submit it to Google and track
its status using the sitemaps report on Search Console.
If you submit a sitemap using this report,
you can see whether we were able to read it, when we read it,
and more.
To learn more about sitemaps and how
to track their status using Search Console,
check the links in the description.
Now that you've checked that your pages are being crawled,
indexed, and served optimally, it's
time to analyze how well your pages are performing
using the performance report.
Here you'll find a chart summarizing impressions,
clicks, average click-through rate, and average position
of your site in search results.
Below the chart, you'll see a list of queries
that users clicked to reach your website.
You can change tabs to view the information broken down
by pages, countries, and search appearance.
Here are four things to look for when analyzing your performance
data.
If the number of impressions is significantly higher
than clicks or, in other words, if the Click-Through Rate,
or CTR, is very low for a query or a page,
you might need to create better titles and descriptions to make
your snippets more attractive in search results.
If search queries that you expect to see don't appear,
your site might not have enough useful content
relevant to those queries.
If important pages on your site are not in the pages list,
there might be an issue with them.
In that case, you should use inspect URL to find out why.
Check how many queries show your site when the user does or does
not include your site's name.
This might show interesting areas
where people are searching for content directly
related to your site.
Those are just a few examples of what information
you can learn from the default reports.
Check out my previous video on the performance report
for a more comprehensive overview on how
to use the report to analyze your organic search
performance.
Before I end this video, I want to discuss one last tool that
might be helpful for you.
Google Trends provides access to a largely unfiltered sample
of actual search requests made to Google.
It's anonymized, categorized, and aggregated.
This allows us to display interesting topics
from around the globe or down to city level.
The data can be useful for governments in many ways.
Here are two ideas.
Check top queries in your region and compare it to the queries
you're getting traffic from, the ones we just discussed
from the performance report.
If there are queries missing from your traffic,
check if you have content on that subject,
and make sure it's being probed and indexed.
Check related queries to important topics
you're interested in.
This might surface rising queries
and help you prepare your site for them,
for example, by adding content related to it.
Try it out by visiting trends.google.com.
It's pretty fun and insightful.
Hopefully, this video helped you optimize your site for search
and monitor its performance if you're a government website.
To recap, optimize your site appearance
from the Google Search with SEO best practices.
Make sure Google can find and index your pages.
Analyze queries that you're ranking for
and queries that you're not.
Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel
to watch our upcoming Search Console videos.
Stay tuned.
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