RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SEOOF UK GOVERNMENT’S GEOSPATIAL METADATA

THE PROBLEM

There is an incomplete picture of geospatial data held.

By not having information about the data, the discoverability and usability is limited, resulting in inefficiencies and missed opportunities to unlock value to the private and the public sectors.

v Underground

v Surface / land use

v Legal

v Coastal

> 2,600 geospatial datasets

GEO6 DATA PROFILE

DATA DISCOVERABILITY 1

UNDERSTANDING THE GEO6’ METADATA

PUBLICATION PROCESS

RECOMMENDATIONS: DATA DISCOVERABILITY – PART 1

Recommendations

Based on user research findings1 Enhancements to CSV catalogues 2 Move away from CSV catalogues in the long term 3 Publishers with no data catalogue to use the CSV format as

an entry point 4 Focus on search engine optimisation (SEO) to improve

discoverability via Google search 5 Keep metadata up to date to improve relevance of search

results 6 Create structured metadata to improve discoverability via

Google search 7 Improve Data.gov.uk’s search functionality to support

synonyms and alternative spellings 8 Make keywords searchable on Data.Gov.uk 9 Prioritise publishers 10 Tag authoritative data 11 Accountability to retire out-of-date data 12 Test granularity of dataset definition 13 Collaborate on a single national catalogue for UK geospatial

data 14 Collaborate with Google so that it becomes the best place to

search for geospatial data 15 Geo6 data catalogues and third-party data catalogues

should be maintained alongside each other 16 Licence information by URIs 17 Licence filter 18 Avoid acronyms and use plain English 19 Promote the use of controlled vocabularies by data

publishers 20 Publish more keywords 21 Publish Keywords as URIs 22 Use taxonomies in the search 23 Allow catalogue browse as well as search

Based on Geo6 project team findings24 Apply a consistent data sharing risk assessment process 25 Publish the outcome of the data sharing risk assessment 26 Publish data passing the risk assessment 27 Display the date from the GEMINI record 28 Search by bounding box 29 Display bounding box in the search results 30 Search by data extent31 Rank the results by closeness of match between the query

extent and the data extent

= Requires ‘Effort’ assessment by Government Digital Service (GDS)

Effort required by geospatial data publishers and facilitators

High

High

Low

Impa

ct o

n D

ata

Disc

over

y

31

29

28

27

27

30

26

25

24

23

21

20

19

18

16

15

14

13

11

1017

12

9

7 8

6

5

4

3

2

1

n

DATA DISCOVERABILITY 2

DATA DISCOVERABIL ITY

2

Data Discoverability was split into 7 workstream

• Data Sharing Assessment;

• Granularity of Data;

• Geospatial Glossary of Terms;

• Third Party Data;

• Authoritative Data;

• Search Engine Optimisation; and

• Portals Landscape.

For the presentation, we will focus on SEO and Granularity.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

SEARCH ENGINE

OPTIMISATION

The SEO review was split into 3 tasks:

• Review of existing research on SEO for data publishers

• Review of web user behaviour

• SEO specialist review

REVIEW OF EXISTING RESEARCH

What we did?A study of existing literature and research from:• Academic sources;• Information published by search engine providers; and• INSPIRE Discovery Workshop – “Making spatial data discoverable via mainstream search engines”

(3rd - 4th July 2019).

What we found?• Search is primary tool for finding data;• The more data that is published on the web, the more difficult it is for users to find what they are

looking for;• Specialism can harm awareness of where to find data;• Quality metadata is key to making data discoverable;• Use structured data to ensure your webpages can be crawled; and• Sitemaps are essential to allow search engines to find all pages.

REVIEW OF WEB USER BEHAVIOUR

What we did?

Collecting of website data from:• Each Geo6 member• Data.gov.ukData covered the period of 1 December 2018 – 31 May 2019

Website Traffic Source from:• BGS;• Coal Authority;• HMLR;• OS;• UKHO; and• Data.gov.uk.

In-site search terms from:• BGS;• OS; and• Data.gov.uk.

Google search terms from:HMLR;OS;UKHO; andData.gov.uk.

KEY FINDINGS: WEBSITE TRAFFIC

• Google was the highest-ranking traffic source for 4 of the 6 assessed (range 73.9 to 41.3% of traffic)

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

BGS

Coal

HMLR OS

UKHO

Data.go

v.uk

Distribution of traffic from different sources

% traffic from Google

% direct traffic

% traffic from other sources

SEO SPECIALIST REVIEW

Page titles are often too long

Summary sections are not always optimised

Shortcomings of one publisher on a portal will affect all others

Special characters can make the text unreadable if not supported

URLs are often too long

SEO BEST PRACTICE GUIDE

• Fill out all metadata fields on data portals

• Page titles < 50-60 characters

• Optimise abstracts

• No keyword lists

• Short URLs (where possible)

• Avoid special characters

• Re-use URLs

• Remove out-of-date pages

• Avoid duplication of metadata

• Use SEO tools to understand your users e.g. Google Analytics, Google Trends

• Apply to all

KEY RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Embed schema.org in HTML using JSON-LD

2. Use sitemaps

3. Ensure pages have their own URL

4. Apply SEO techniques to page content

5. Apply SEO techniques to page URLs

6. Improve the governance around published metadata

7. Understand how your users search for your data

Effort: Impact:

Effort: Impact:

Effort: Impact:

Effort: Impact:

Effort: Impact:

Effort: Impact:

Effort: Impact:

DATA GRANULARITY

S E O –TH E

D E M A N D C U RV E

FINDINGS, RECOMMENDATIONS

AND OUTCOMES

• Use and group together real-world concepts

• Focus on the ‘chunky middle’ – Roads, Rivers, Addresses

• Reflect both 1 and 2 in metadata titles and content

• Use Plain English

• Avoid acronyms and abbreviations

• Assume no domain knowledge – target age is a 14-year-old

• Exploit your brand recognition

• Optimise for Google

DATA DISCOVERABILITY 3

WHAT’S NEXT?

1. Interoperable Catalogues

1. Consistent Geo6 metadata catalogues2. Transition from CSV catalogues to Gemini Records optimised for search engines3. Exemplar demonstrator metadata portal to test and validate DD1 and DD2 findings

2. Guidance and Standards for Metadata

1. Register of Geospatial Data Publishers2. Best practice guide for the first-time publisher3. Recommendations for updates and improvements to Gemini