 Hi, I'm Daniel Weisberg, 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. 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 result 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 meta tag. A description meta 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 short phrase, the description may be as long as a program. Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. So make sure to write a description that would both inform and interest the users. Use heading tags to emphasize important text. Use meaningful headings throughout your content to indicate important topics and create a 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 intro links. Government websites usually provide guidance on multiple subjects to a broad audience. These 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 breadcrumbs 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 rich results. There are 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 way and it can be a valuable resource. After optimizing your content, make sure that Google can find and index your pages. These can be easily uncovered using the index-covered 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 reporting, 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 the 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 the 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 click to reach your website. You can change tabs to view the information broken down by pages, count fees 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. These 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 optimize your organic search performance. Before I end this video, I want to discuss one less 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 interest in 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 trolled and indexed. Check related queries to important topics you're interested in. These might surface surprising queries and help you prepare your site for them. For example, by adding content related to it. Try out by visiting trends.google.com, pretty fun, and inside. 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 on 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!