Purpose
Google Programmable Search (GPS) helps you create a custom search for your website, letting you highlight important pages through "promotions." Promotions are useful if your website has a lot of content, but you want users to quickly find a specific page. GPS also lets you include results from other websites if your agency has content across multiple domains, offering users a single search experience.
When to Use Google Programmable Search
- You want to highlight specific pages for popular search terms using the promotion feature, making it easy for users to find key information when they search on your site.
- You manage a large site or have resources spread across multiple sites, such as your agency site plus other iowa.gov resources, and want search to show results from these sources as well.
- You want to limit search results to content specifically on your agency site.
Benefits of Google Programmable Promotions
- Increased Visibility: Promotions place key pages at the top of search results, making them easy to find.
- Targeted Messaging: You can customize titles to match users’ search terms, making them more relevant and likely to be clicked.
Google Programmable Search promotions help users find important pages quickly, improving their experience on your website.
Gaining Access to Google Programmable Search
The DX support team helps to manage the google programmable search account for the agencies that are on the platform. If you would like to access your agency google programmable search for your agency you can submit a service desk request. You can also request this on behalf of another team member.
Why isn't my site search working?
If agency managers notice that the search function on their site isn't working, it may not be a code issue. One common cause is not adding the site to the "Sites to Search" section in Google Programmable Search. This prevents google programmable search from indexing and searching that specific site and showing search results when the search feature is used on your site.
How to Fix the Search on your site
First if you have access to your agency google programmable search account, navigate to the "Look and Feel" within the Overview section and from their see if your site url is added within the "Sites to search" field.
If it's not added then select the "Add" button and add your sites url and then save the changes.
You can then test to see if the search function is working correctly by doing a simple search on your site to see if it pulls up results and if it does then the issue is now fixed.
Types of URLs Search Configuration available
- Whole Site (https://www.example.com/): This includes everything on the site in the search results.
- Single Page (https://www.example.com/about-us): This limits the search to only that one page.
- Part of the Site (https://www.example.com/news/): This lets the search show results only from a specific section of the site, like all the pages in a news.
How to Create Search Promotions
To add promotions for specific search terms you can navigate to the "Search Feature" section within the sidebar menu and then select "Promotions" tab which is where you can select the "Add" button to start adding search terms that you would like for the promotion to appear for.
For example, when you search for “absolute links” within the DX training site search the promotion from google as the trigger if users frequently search for it.
How to Edit or Remove a Search Promotion
You can easily edit any of the google programmable search promotions that are currently active for the search of your site by selecting the search term that you want to edit within the "Query" column in Google Programmable search "Promotion" section within the "Search Features" tab.
When you click on the link in the query column you want to edit a pop up will appear and then within this window you can make your edits like adding more search terms, changing the url, update the description or even add an image.
This popup window will also show you a preview of what the promotion will look like within your site search as well.
To delete a promotion you can simply select the checkbox next to the one you want to remove and then select the "Delete" button.
