Helping health organizations make COVID-19 information more accessible

Health organizations are busier than ever providing information to help with the COVID-19 pandemic. To better assist them, Google has created a best practices article to guide health organizations to make COVID-19 information more accessible on Search. We’ve also created a new technical support group for eligible health organizations.

Best practices for search visibility

By default, Google tries to show the most relevant, authoritative information in response to any search. This process is more effective when content owners help Google understand their content in appropriate ways.

To better guide health-related organizations in this process (known as SEO, for “search engine optimization”), we have produced a new help center article with some important best practices, with emphasis on health information sites, including:

• How to help users access your content on the go
• The importance of good page content and titles
• Ways to check how your site appears for coronavirus-related queries
• How to analyze the top coronavirus related user queries
• How to add structured data for FAQ content

New support group for health organizations

In addition to our best practices help page, health organizations can take part in our new technical support group that’s focused on helping health organizations who publish COVID-19 information with Search related questions.

We’ll be approving requests for access on a case-by-case basis. At first we’ll be accepting only domains under national health ministries and US state level agencies. We’ll inform of future expansions here in this blog post, and on our Twitter account. You’ll need to register using either an email under those domains (e.g. name@health.gov) or have access to the website Search Console account.

Fill this form to request access to the COVID-19 Google Search group 

The group was created to respond to the current needs of health organizations, and we intend to deprecate the group as soon as COVID-19 is no longer considered a Public Health Emergency by WHO or some similar deescalation is widely in place.

Everyone is welcome to use our existing webmaster help forum, and if you have any questions or comments, please let us know on Twitter.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate & Ofir Roval, Search Console Lead PM