local government

SEO for non-experts: what you need to know

Why do so many councils have such a poor online presence? I’ve written before about some of the missed opportunities, such as here, but for me the puzzle is as much “what should a council do?” as “why don’t more of them do it?”

Part of the explanation, at least from the councillor side, is average age. Councillors are on average near retirement (58.3 in 2006), which means not many have either grown up with the modern internet age or worked in firms created by it.

The challenge then for the typical older councillor is to have enough knowledge to know what their council could or should be doing and to have some idea of whether or not its staff and contractors are doing a good job.

In some areas councillors are usually good at this; for example, councillors are often intensive email users and well placed to tell whether or not an email system is up to scratch.

Search engine optimisation is an area at the other end of the spectrum – often over-looked by councillors and often not done well by councils. So what does a councillor need to know?

What is search engine optimisation (SEO)?

SEO means a bundle of work in order to make a particular website come out near or at the top of search results when someone is using Google or another search engine.

Why does SEO matter?

For councils, it matters for two primary reasons. First, people often use Google as their jumping off point to find information. With search results, almost no-one clicks on results that don’t come up on the first page, and even on the first page the number of people who click on a search result declines rapidly as you move down the page. So if you’re not on the first page you miss out on getting people coming to your website.

Second, councils often provide information that the public don’t immediately associate with the council. Tips on how to live a greener lifestyle are a good example, Many councils put a lot of effort in to publicising this sort of information, but most online members of the public won’t think, “I’ll see what the council has to say about saving on my electricity bills”. Instead, they go to Google and look for information generally. If you want the council information to be found and used, it has to come up high in the search results.

What does SEO involve?

Most SEO work falls into a research phase and then three areas of activity.

The research phase involves working out what the key information is that the website wants to get over (e.g. recycling information) and then the phrases that the public use when searching for such information (e.g. do people talk about “waste” or “rubbish” or “refuse” when looking for such information?). Firms such as Google provide very detailed information about people’s aggregate search habits for free, so the end result of this search should be a specific list of topics and terms which the website needs to perform well on.

Tip one for councillors: ask to see the list of terms the site is being optimised for. If it doesn’t exist, then either the website team is neglecting SEO or they are doing it poorly. The list may be informally in several people’s heads, on a post-it note or in an email somewhere. So you may need to add some extra judgement about how methodical the work has been and whether that suits the size of council and the budget given to online matters.

The three areas of work then are technical, copy and outreach.

Technical works means the way web pages are coded and the content on them marked up. Some ways of producing web pages are liked by search engines, other ways hide their content from them. This is perhaps the hardest area for a non-technical person to judge. My to three tips, based on what is most often got wrong if people aren’t thinking SEO, are:

  1. Look at the photos and see whether they have any “alt” text set (this is the text that appears if you hover over the photo or right click on it, depending on your web browser)
  2. Are the headlines on the page marked up with H1 HTML tags? Don’t worry if you don’t know how to check this; it’s pretty easy to do, so just ask someone who is a bit familiar with creating websites!
  3. Do the web addresses for individual pages contain real words or are they long technical strings? E.g. www.MyCouncil.org.uk/655804231 will do less well in searches for recycling than www.MyCouncil.org.uk/recycling-news/update

The next area of SEO work is copy: does the text on the site regularly and prominently use the key words and phrases identified from the research? Pages should still read naturally, but they can be written in a way that uses the key terms more rather than less.

The third area is outreach, or “link building”, i.e. getting other websites to link through to yours. The more links you have, the better the site does in searches – though to stop abuse, search engines give more importance to links from well respected other sites. External tools can be a bit hit and miss in the number of links they list, but try going to Google and search for link:www.Islington.gov.uk changing “Islington” to your council. You can then do this for several other similar councils and see how the total number of links Google lists compares.

Improving SEO

Checking these areas should give a councillor a good idea of whether their website team is on the ball at SEO, doing it poorly or just ignoring it. Based on that, an appropriate follow-up at the senior level with council staff can be made.

Senior council staff may or may not understand SEO too! But with these answers both sides of that conversation will know whether more detailed follow up is needed down through the organisation – and how to judge whether any follow up really produces results.

Good luck!

Mark Pack worked for the Liberal Democrats 2000-2009, ending up as their Head of Innovations. During that time he often trained councillors on how to make better use of the internet. He’s now at Mandate Communications (www.YourMandate.com) and blogs about politics, history and technology at www.MarkPack.org.uk. He’s on Twitter at @markpack.

The myth of engaging with everyone

When I talk to people about the possibilities of engaging with people online, using social technology, I often get questioned about the numbers issue. Stuff like:

  • How many people in our area actually use Twitter?
  • What about people who don’t have web access?
  • What do we do about people who don’t like using the internet to communicate?

…and so on.

It’s night on impossible to give the people who ask these questions the answers that they want. Really, they’re asking the wrong questions.

That’s because they are assuming that what they are doing now already covers all the bases. The fact is, that it doesn’t.

  • Meetings usually exclude anyone with a job, because even when they are in the evening, most people are too knackered to attend or have other stuff to do
  • Printed media usually goes straight into the recycling bin
  • Few people pay attention to the Council stuff in the local paper

The first thing to be clear on is that no one engagement method will reach, or suit, everyone.

The second thing to be clear on, is that you don’t necessarily want to reach everyone, anyway.

The latter point is true of the people within organisations as much as it is people outside. A small percentage of employees couldn’t give a toss about their jobs and are generally quite bad at them. The majority are perfectly competent but aren’t so into their work that they are constantly thinking of ways that things could be done better. Then there are the small number left, the committed, enthusiastic and innovative folk who care about what they do and will put effort into improving things.

My argument would always be to focus on the small number of active, enthusiastic people first.

Likewise, when engaging with citizens, most won’t be too fussed about knowing how their council does things in too much detail, for example. They might like to know that it is being done reasonably well, and cost effectively, but in terms of getting too involved, they’d rather not. But there will be a smaller group of people, those with some social capital to burn up, who want to get involved, who actively think about making things better, and who’ll give up their time to help.

Those are the people you should go after. Don’t waste time convincing people who aren’t and never will be interested to do something they don’t want to do. It’ll make everyone, including them and you, unhappy.

So when people ask about whether 100% of the people in your organisation, or who live in the area, will be involved with a digital engagement project just be honest and say no. But add that you’ll probably get more interest than through current methods, and that they’ll be different people, and people who care.

Google blogs to follow

One of the things I like about Google is the number of blogs they have, used by many of the teams at the company to document their work and share some good stuff.

Here are some of the ones I follow that I think might be of use to others who read this blog.

You can find a directory of official Google blogs here.

Unofficial blogs about Google that I read include:

Selling the benefits

I attended the session by Liz Azyan and Simon Hume at Socitm09 on social media – which was ostensibly about the blocking of social networking sites in the workplace but which was also a general discussion around the benefits of this new way of working.

As a follow up, a brief discussion took place on Twitter last night around how senior management can be engaged and convinced of the necessity of using this technology. Carl Haggerty at Devon County Council always points to the fact that he got his Chief Exec on board early on, and the role this played in getting adoption throughout the organisation.

Various web tools were discussed, then I rather grumpily responded:

I would say that if you want to engage senior m’ment on a large scale, you’re unlikely to succeed with any web tool

Which sounds very negative, but wasn’t really meant to be so – my point was more that there are more effective ways of going about things. Basically, you have to talk to them.

Get a spot on a meeting agenda, and make the most out of the time you have, by focusing on what you can achieve. Don’t go into detail about how to set up a blog, or how to tag a link in Delicious. Instead, focus your energy on whipping up some enthusiasm, and inspiring a bit of curiosity.

Also, focus on what the benefits are for them, and for their organisation. Don’t make the mistake of putting all this stuff into a box marked ‘web’ or ‘communications’. Make it clear that this is less about marketing and a whole lot more about forging a new relationship between the organisation and citizens, or customers.

In other words, before you even mention technology, make sure you have some idea of what the point of all this is. For local government, this is about opening councils to conversations between authorities and the people, businesses and organisations it serves. It’s about bringing together communications, customer service and service design into one iterative process, each one informing the other. It’s about local government choosing the right delivery method for each service it provides, whether doing it itself, getting a social enterprise involved or handing it over to the private sector. It’s about government at all levels taking a more forward thinking attitude to its information assets and making them available to those who can do useful things with them.

The web, and social media, is just a means to an end, after all. Anyone who tells any organisation that they are golden if they just start a blog, or twitter account, is doing that organisation a massive disservice. At best the web, social or otherwise, is an enabler to a bigger change and one that benefits everyone.

Because, of course, websites don’t change the world, people do.

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