SEO for governments and authority entities – Google Search Console Training (from home)
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. [MUSIC PLAYING] 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. [MUSIC PLAYING].
