There’s not a lot of emphasis placed on SEO development for most city, town and county websites. The general trend seems to be that having a functional website in and of itself is simply “enough.” However, the implementation of these tools by other area businesses can actually make it difficult for organizations foregoing search optimization efforts. Simply put, SEO efforts are important for any website.
Informed Residents
SEO tools can improve the visibility of pages and events for cities, towns and counties. Visibility often isn’t a concern for these entities, because their website home page will usually appear in top search results. Meanwhile, individual pages for community events, public meetings and other important information can be difficult to find online. These pages are competing with local news organizations, business pages and social media for spots in search results.
Government entities often pride themselves on being a go-to informational resource for the community, so improving SEO for new website pages and posts ensures people find what they need.
Implementing SEO
There are a number of website plug-ins that can do the heavy lifting of SEO implementation. Set-up generally involves a fairly straightforward approach filling out various fields for metadata and keyphrases.
The most important part of this task is choosing the right keyphrases. Google and other specialized SEO services have ranking tools available to help determine the best-fitting keywords/phrases for your website.
Keyphrases Aren’t What They Used to Be
15 or so years ago, SEO was associated with “inserting a keyword/phrase into copy as much as possible to get it to rank.” While there’s value in identifying ideal key phrases, the meta data actually does a lot of the “heavy lifting.”
Metadata refers to items such as:
- Regular content creation/refresh
- Age of the website
- Internal/external links
- Alt image attributes
- Location
Getting the Most Out of Your Website
The harsh truth is that even a well-functioning website isn’t likely a go-to resource for the community if it’s static. Prioritizing the online publication of event updates, meetings, and public safety information (especially now) go a long way. Setting up SEO for the pages along the way ensures that Google is crawling the site efficiently, recognizing relevance and prioritizing via search engine results.
If your website traffic reports are lack-luster, visit our GovWeb service pages to learn more about how we’re boosting traffic for cities, towns and counties every day.