Search Recommendations

About search recommendations

“Search recommendations” are suggested pages that appear in the Our top recommendations for you section when you perform a search on VA.gov. These suggestions are selected for specific terms and are intended to help Veterans and their beneficiaries find relevant results quickly.

Example

Usage

When to use search recommendations

• For content and tools that support a Veteran, family member, or caregiver’s ability to apply for, manage, or use their VA benefits and services
• For content that has a high volume of keyword searches but isn’t ranking within the first page of search results

When to consider something else

• Content intended for VA partners, contractors, or employees. Elevating content or tools that don’t apply to VA.gov’s primary audience (Veterans, their families, and caregivers) could mislead users and direct them to information that doesn’t apply to them.
• Localized content and events. Recommended results aren’t personalized or filtered by a visitor’s geographic location. Featuring this type of information would result in misleading site visitors outside of the intended area.
• Content that already ranks within the first page of search results for related keywords. Adding recommended results for content that already ranks high in search is redundant and adds noise to search results.
• Content or keywords that people aren’t searching for. If site visitors aren’t searching for content or using specific keywords, a search recommendations placement won’t help.
• Promoting related content. We shouldn’t use search recommendations to promote content that’s related to the keyword, but not a direct match (for example, promoting a pension page on a disability search). Search recommendations are meant to match a person’s search query, not advertise other content. Consider cross-linking within content pages instead.
• Time-sensitive, promotional, or rapidly evolving information. We shouldn’t use recommended results for urgent updates such as legislative changes or public health advisories, blogs, news releases, or press materials. These items can change quickly, vary by location, or require context that a static featured result can’t provide.
• Pages external to VA.gov. VA.gov search is for site visitors to find VA information. Search shouldn’t link visitors away from VA.gov. If an external site has information critical to VA’s primary audience, a page should exist on VA.gov that provides context and allows the site visitor to decide if they want to link away from VA.gov for more information.
• Documents. Search recommendations shouldn’t link directly to documents. Documents are often not accessible and can create challenging usability issues, especially on mobile devices. Convert documents to web pages when possible.
• Authenticated pages. Search recommendations can’t link directly to authenticated pages because not all users have access to information behind authentication. Consider evaluating search performance for unauthenticated supporting content instead.

Usability guidance

• We can set up search recommendations to match the visitor’s search term to the recommendation’s title, description, or keywords assigned to it. Or it can be set up to match to keywords only.
• A maximum of 2 search recommendations can appear on a search results page.
• Search recommendations appear based on relevancy match to the title, then description, then based on creation date. If there are more than 2 search recommendations that match the search terms entered, the same criteria are used to rank and determine which 2 are shown. We can create only 1 search recommendation for a page. Multiple search recommendations with different text pointing to the same page URL isn’t possible.

Content considerations

• The title (link label) must use the H1 of the destination page
• The description (supporting text) must use the meta description of the landing page
• The destination URL must be the canonical URL for the page

Keyword considerations

• We can also add keywords to a search recommendation. We should only add keywords when they’re commonly searched for and specific to the content in the recommendation.
• We shouldn’t use keywords to trigger search recommendations to appear for terms that aren’t directly related to the content in the linked page. For example, if a search recommendation is about pension benefits, we shouldn’t add the word “disability” as a keyword.
• Keywords shouldn’t be broad terms. Standalone terms like “eligibility” or “compensation” apply to many different topics and don’t help visitors find relevant search results. For example, if a visitor is trying to find information on health care eligibility, it would be very frustrating if there was a search recommendation for disability benefits because we added the keyword “eligibility” to that recommendation.

Examples

These keywords can be helpful to add, when appropriate:

• Words, 1- to 2-word phrases, or acronyms that aren’t already included in or are slightly different than the title or description
• Misspellings or plural variations of keywords already in the title or description
• Synonyms of keywords that are included in the title or description (for example, “travel pay” for a travel reimbursement page, if the search volume shows a high number of searches for that synonym)

Request process

1. Submit a request to set up or change a search recommendation in GitHub at least 2 weeks prior to any target dates
2. The content and IA team will evaluate the request and provide results of analysis, recommendations, and next steps
3. The content and IA team will implement changes, as applicable