The Data Standards Directory - development update 20th October 2022

Dear all, please find a link to the latest development weekly update highlighting the work we have delivered in the last week and what we intend to do next week.

This week has allowed us to monitor some of the search engine improvements we have introduced, such as in Google on the image below. While we are approaching 700 users, we can see a significant increase in search impressions. This means search engines are including the site in their results pages for certain queries, and will lead to further traffic (CTR – click through rate) as this continues.

While our average position in Google is 30 overall, it is around 3rd place in the results when searching for ‘nhs data standards’ for example as indexing continues.

We look to have made ourselves eligible for Google dataset search this week, making standards even more findable as this now starts to index and we are monitoring the dataset search site for when it will get picked up. When going to a standard you can now see this meta and schema.org dataset markup present for machines to discover and ‘scrape’. This will ensure that search engines will start to display the description we want in their search results pages.

As a team we have started meeting with different website teams to discover how we could work together, to source and integrate more standards into the directory and to effectively signpost between us. We also started to explore research questions about how we could develop functionality to help users determine what standards apply to care providers, suppliers and other users to the directory.

Next week we are continuing more work to review metadata from other standards sites and catalogues to consider how we expand the metadata we hold around standards. We are looking to analyse the research carried out this week on the editing experience for maintaining the directory and implementing improvements coming out of this.

Please do continue to test out data.standards.nhs.uk and let us know any feedback we can use to plan further improvements or if you are interested in participating in research with us.

Many thanks,

Bharat ‘buh-rut’ Sharma

Senior Product Manager of data.standards.nhs.uk - the ‘Standards Directory’. Standards and Interoperability Team at NHS England