djbaxter
Administrator
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2012
- Messages
- 3,778
- Solutions
- 2
- Reaction score
- 1,877
How to Add a COVID-19 Announcement to Your Website with Schema
by Nick Pierno, Whitespark
April 2, 2020
Google has provided an additional tool you can use to get out a message regarding your business during COVID-19 Structured data for COVID-19 announcements.
developers.google.com
Read more...
by Nick Pierno, Whitespark
April 2, 2020
Google has provided an additional tool you can use to get out a message regarding your business during COVID-19 Structured data for COVID-19 announcements.
Special Announcement (SpecialAnnouncement) Structured Data | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers
Learn how you can implement structured data to a special announcement so people can find the latest changes to your organization.
developers.google.com
What are we going to mark up?
For most of my clients, I’ve added a banner to their header and a page (or a pop-up) to their site explaining the changes they’ve made that impact clients. I’m going to use Broadmead Physiotherapy (out of Victoria) as a guinea pig. Here’s how it looks for them:
Based on this, here is the information we want to convey in the search results for this business, if possible:
Your points might be a bit different, but probably along similar lines.
- We’re still serving clients
- Our doors are closed
- We’re offering ehealth/telehealth services instead of in person visits
- Learn more on our website
How do we mark this up?
We’ll be using the SpecialAnnouncement schema type. This requires at least 3 properties:
I don’t think any of those alternative (to text) properties will apply for most local businesses (except for maybe newsUpdatesAndGuidelines, whose purpose is a little unclear to me). For now we’ll use the text property, and treat it like a description.
- datePosted (The date that the COVID-19 announcement was published in)
- name (the short title of the COVID-19 announcement)
- text OR one of the following properties that point to more info about the announcement
- diseasePreventionInfo
- diseaseSpreadStatistics
- gettingTestedInfo
- newsUpdatesAndGuidelines
- publicTransportClosuresInfo
- quarantineGuidelines
- schoolClosuresInfo
- travelBans
There are also a bunch of recommended properties to consider including. I think the most applicable ones to our use case are:
- announcementLocation
- announcementLocation.address
- announcementLocation.name
- announcementLocation.url
- category
Here’s my JSON-LD snippet that includes the required and select recommended properties:
See How to Add a COVID-19 Announcement to Your Website with Schema for the JSON-LD code.
I think most local businesses will be able to use this exact snippet (with the property values replaced, of course).
I’ve placed this code in the <head> section of every page on Broadmead’s site. I think it makes sense for this markup to go on all pages, and I didn’t see anything that indicates it should be only tied to a particular page, so we’ll go with that for now.
Test your markup
You can test your snippet by pasting it into Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. Once you’ve confirmed you have no errors, add it to your site.
Note: you might notice that announcementLocation returns an error in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
Google says:
Once your snippet is added to your site, you might also want to run one of your URLs through the testing tool, just to be sure Google can see it (may need to flush your cache on some hosts).
Finally, it wouldn’t hurt to request a recrawl in Search Console, just to make sure Google’s on the up and up.
Read more...
