Best practices for education sites in Google Search

If you're a representative of an education site, and your site provides educational content or products in support of schools responding to coronavirus, here are some recommendations for how to make your content and tools more discoverable on Google Search:

1. To make sure educators and students can find your content on Google Search, make your tool or content available outside of a login. If your page is hidden behind a login, Google won't be able to crawl that page, and therefore is unable to index it and show the page in Google Search.
2. If you've recently added pages to your site, created new lessons, or made changes to existing educational resources, ask Google to recrawl and re-index your URLs. For individual pages, use the URL Inspection Tool. For many pages, use a sitemap file.
   You can learn more about crawling and indexing with our Crawling and Indexing FAQs.
3. See what COVID-19-related queries show your site in Search, how you rank for those queries, and whether users click through to your site:
   1. Open the Search Console Performance report. Filter for the last 7 days to focus on topics most relevant to recent searches.
   2. If coronavirus is only the focus for a small part of your site, add a URL filter to focus on pages that are relevant to coronavirus.
   3. Find your top clicked COVID-19 pages, see which queries show that page in Search, and confirm that your page answers those queries comprehensively and clearly.
   4. Sort the table by impressions to identify relevant queries that have high impressions but low CTR relative to their position. Try aligning the title and content to better answer those user queries.
4. Visit Google Trends to see which terms people are searching for. For example, there may be spikes in searches for "learning from home" and "teaching remotely", which could help you determine new content to publish.
5. If your site publishes coronavirus-related announcements (for example, school closure announcements, re-opening updates, health announcements), add SpecialAnnouncement structured data to your web pages. If you don't have access to your site's HTML, or your announcement is urgent, you can submit the announcement in Search Console.
   When you provide structured data on your website, Google can more easily extract and present the information in search results in useful ways. Properly implemented structured data can appear in Google with special formatting to help present your information more prominently.
6. To help ensure your website is available, accessible, secure, and usable during COVID-19, check out our new web developer resources.

For help and support, you can also check our Search Central Help Community and post a question to get answers from experts.