Project Description
Federal Sustainable Development Strategy
The Federal Sustainable Development Strategy is the government’s plan and vision for a more sustainable Canada. It outlines goals and actions to promote clean growth, ensure healthy ecosystems and build safe, secure and sustainable communities.
Goal
To provide Search Engine Optimization (SEO) recommendations for search visibility of dynamic and static FSDS goals and supporting content. To develop a set of Search Engine Optimization recommendations that fits within the technical and cost constraints of System-scope resources and the capacity of the FSDS team. This will raise FSDS in search result ranking based on specific keywords and ensure the 13 Federal Sustainable Development Strategy goals are visible to Canadians when they search Google.ca
Search Visibility Recommendations
The Issue
Although FSDS web content renders within web browsers for humans to consume it does not render properly for search engines to find and index.
The Impact
Canadians can not use a Search Engine (like Google.ca) to find Federal Sustainable Development Strategy content online.
The Solution
Update the content delivery mechanism to ensure the existing content is rendered properly for both search engines and humans. We recognize that this deep infrastructure change will have significant resource requirements and as such should be phased in over a period of time and/or integrated into a larger web renewal project.
Summary of Recommendations
Content Delivery
Migrate to a delivery process by which each web page has its own unique URL with crawlable HTML.
The web team will need to adopt a number of recommendations.
Search Engine Optimized Content
Create 26 (13 English + 13 French) static ‘goal pages’ to establish a critical minimum exposure to Google.ca.
Add Key SEO elements to each content piece.
Optional Training
Help FSDS monitor KPIs using two common SEO tools.
Provide SEO training for content creators and/or ongoing SEO services for new FSDS content.
Discovery
What Humans See
What Google.ca Sees
What Humans See
What Google.ca Sees
No Data in Google Search Console
Google has not updated it’s index in 13 days.
Likely Google has determined that the site is not ‘worth’ crawling very frequently based on the content and links to the site.
No meaningful content is indexed by Google
Google Search Engine
10 documents in total found in a Google search; most of them are PDF files and one is the home page.
The FSDS home page contains no content as humans see it.
Google is not capturing any of the goal content in its index.
Log File Analysis
Google was either unable to or has not yet crawled FSDS content.
Google Search Console
No data has been collected from Google Console because it cannot access site content.
MOZ.com
19 Keywords Tracked
2 Keywords on bottom of first page
1 Keyword on second page of results
16 Keywords not in top 50 results
Google.ca
Keyword Visibility Score & Rank using MOZ.com
Baseline KPI’s
Google Analytics
Use the number of organic sessions as your key performance indicator.
Found under “Acquisition”>”All Traffic”>”Channels” section of Google Analytics.
Content Delivery Recommendations
Most importantly, the ideal solution would be to have every ‘page’ of content the visitors can see and explore in the Angular app delivered as a static HTML page so that search engines can crawl and index the content.
Dynamic Rendering
Developers include logic on the website that checks every request and serves up static content/pages if the request comes from a bot, and a “normal” web browser is served the JavaScript/Angular content.
SEO Impact
Google.ca can index a subset of the content found on the site. The amount of content indexed is dependent upon the number of pages implemented. If this is applied to 13 goals that would
Pre Rendering
This may only work for static content as HTML is created at build-time and stored to serve upon request.
SEO Impact
By pre-rendering, JavaScript is rendered in a browser, the static HTML is saved and returned to the crawlers/search engines.
Pre Rendering
This may only work for static content as HTML is created at build-time and stored to serve upon request.
SEO Impact
By pre-rendering, JavaScript is rendered in a browser, the static HTML is saved and returned to the crawlers/search engines.
Technical Recommendations
The following recommendations have been provided to Systemscope in more detail. These will be incorporated into the adopted as part of the Content Delivery Mechanism.
Search Friendly URLs
Site Speed
Mobile Viewport
Add Sitemap
Add Hreflang Tags
Search Friendly URLs
URLs should:
Be easy for humans to read
Contain keywords
Be one for each content piece
Site Speed
Scale Images on the homepage (https://fsds-sfdd.ca)
Serving appropriately-sized images can save many bytes of data and improve the performance of your site’s pages, especially on low speed mobile devices.
Add Browser Caching
Page load times can be significantly improved by asking visitor’s browsers to save and reuse image and JS files included on fsds-sfdd.ca
- Optimize Images
Image files should be compressed to reduce page load times. Optimizing images on the homepage would produce a reduction of about 47%.
- Minify JavaScript, CSS & HTML
By compacting JavaScript code, the site can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution times.
Mobile Viewport
Pages across the site should be designed for all device types and sizes.
The homepage does not currently remain within the viewport on mobile screens.
Sitemap
A sitemap is:
An XML file located on your site.
Provides information about the pages & other files on your site.
Google uses it to intelligently crawl & find content on the FSDS site.
Hreflang
Since the site has multiple versions of a page for different languages, we need to tell Google about these variations. Doing so will help Google point users to the most appropriate version of a page on the site for their language/region.
On-Page Content Recommendations
Create Static HTML Pages for Each Goal
A critical minimum recommendation is to create entry pages for each FSDS goals. These 26 pages (13 English and 13 French) will establish a foothold for the critical search terms FSDS would like to rank for.
These Goal Entry Pages would:
Provide the first step to making the goals visible to search engines.
Provide a launching point for arriving web visitors to the deeper dynamic searching and filtering content.
Be the only pages visible to Google.ca and thus the only content Canadian’s could search for on their favourite search engine.
Impact the publishing tool to update it to support this.
Critical SEO Page Elements
Each content page must have on-page elements structured so that search engines can understand and crawl the content efficiently. This will have an impact
SEO elements required for rich pages:
Header tags
Bread crumbs
Structured data
Title tags
Meta descriptions
300-500 words
Interlinking content
Proposed Goal Page
- Header tags
Bread crumbs
Structured data
Title tags
Meta descriptions
300-500 words
Interlinking content
- Header tags
- Bread crumbs
Structured data
Title tags
Meta descriptions
300-500 words
Interlinking content
Proposed Tabbed Content Pages
This is the tabbed content that needs to be exposed to Google.
Six tabs, many left nav components.
Proposed
Make each ‘tab’ and each content piece in the left nav it’s own static page with unique URL. This shows the 4 content pieces inside the ‘Listening to Canadians’ tab.
Optional Training Recommendations
Monitor KPIs
Coverage
Use Google Search Console to monitor the pages and types of content Google indexes from the site. Identify crawl, page and server errors.
Search Visibility
Use MOZ.com tools to track the 19 keywords for visibility scores and use it’s resources and guides to continuously improve the rankings through good on page SEO practices.
Performance
Use Google Search Console to uncover new keywords and content driving visitors to the FSDS website.
Content Writing
- Provided by a SME who can work with your team to help write content for both humans and search engines.
Help find those keywords most important to your business.
How to use MOZ / Google Search Console and other tools in-house.
Keywords Tracked in MOZ.com
19 English & French Keywords
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