Highlight COVID-19 Announcements by SpecialAnnouncement
Because of the Corona Virus outbreak, many organizations like Schools, Health Organisations, and Governments are publishing important coronavirus-related announcements that affect our lives. For this, Google has introduced a new structured data to highlight special announcements on Google Search. These organizations can add SpecialAnnouncement structured data to their website pages or submit COVID-19 announcements in Search Console.
When you add SpecialAnnouncement structured data to your web page, it can appear with a COVID-19 announcement rich result with your regular listing. This contains a summary that you can expand to view more.
Implement COVID-19 announcements
You can implement your COVID-19 announcements by:
- Adding SpecialAnnouncement structured data to your web page– you can add this schema type to your website pages to let Google know about your announcements. Google also recommends this method because it’s easy. Below is the example of a school closure announcement:
<html>
<head>
<title>COVID-19 School Announcements</title>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "SpecialAnnouncement",
"name": "COVID-19 School Announcements",
"text": "All schools will remain closed through a minimum of May 30 in alignment with school districts across all NY areas.",
"datePosted": "2020-03-18T08:00",
"expires": "2020-03-26T23:59",
"category": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q81068910",
"schoolClosuresInfo": "https://example.org/announcements/extended-closure-notice",
"announcementLocation": {
"@type": "CivicStructure",
"name": "Example School",
"url": "https://example-school.org/",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "123 Example Drive",
"addressLocality": "New York",
"postalCode": "12345",
"addressRegion": "NY",
"addressCountry": "US"
}
}
}
</script>
- Using Search Console – If you are not able to implement structured data, you can submit a COVID-19 announcement in Search Console here.
Reports for Special Announcements in Search Console
You can see reports in the Search Console for the websites that have implemented SpecialAnnouncement structured data. In this report, you can see errors, warnings, and valid pages for markup implemented on your site.
Special Announcements in Performance report
You can also see the performance of your SpecialAnnouncement marked-up pages on Google Search under the performance tab in the search console. You can check the impressions, clicks, and CTR of your special announcement pages.