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In an organisation that delivers the breadth of services as does a local council/government you can safely bet Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will not be a top priority. Unfortunately so.
Why you ask?
I am going to make a couple of huge assumptions and I believe it would be a mix of both....
- The thinking would be they do not have competition. No other organisation is delivering the services within their municipality. The market is tied-up.
- It is not even on the radar. The website development project is tendered out and SEO is not even included in the brief. The fact that I'm not aware of any local councils engaging SEO activity on an ongoing basis just reaffirms this. Not that they have any reason to flag it with me!
So I thought it would be an interesting exercise to start looking at the Councils in Melbourne to perform a basic SEO audit on their websites.
Starting with - City of Casey, Wyndham City, and City of Whittlesea.
I should highlight a few things before I get started. This is by no means a complete SEO Audit, it is as mentioned a brief snapshot to provide some basic insight. It should also be highlighted that few websites, certainly not too many SME sites are as complex in their nature as a Council/Government site. So in short, SEO on these things is not easy!
But here we go...
For the purposes of the audits I will be looking at five general criteria:
- Speed
- Mobile Experience
- Off-Site Authority
- On-Site Optimisation
- Schema Implementation (Markup language to assist in optimising search results)
City of Whittlesea
The City of Whittlesea is located in Melbourne's northern suburbs, about 20 kilometres from the Melbourne GPO.
Speed
When using GTMetrix to score the speed of the City of Whittlesea home page they score 72/100 for Google Page Speed and 73 for Yahoo's YSlow. Not a bad result but it would be advantageous to work on improving the scores.
Image optimisation is usually a huge drag on speed and despite the low score the website comes in at only 645kb which is exceptional for a Council website.
Mobile
Their website fails to pass Google's Mobile-Friendly Test. With Google's ranking factor update coming soon this leaves the City of Whittlesea website vulnerable to a hit in search rankings.
Google Page Speed allows us to grade the speed of a website from a smartphone and this website scores 60/100 which is not great but a good effort considering they are serving a full desktop website.
Off-Site
Domain Authority - 48
MozTrust - 5.44
Referring Domains - 104,483
Google+ Local - Present but not optimised. At time of writing 262,396 views.
On-Site Optimisation
Home Page Meta Title - City of Whittlesea, Melbourne, Australia
Home Page Meta Description - N/A
Pages with Missing Meta Description - 729
Duplicate Page Titles - 108
Pages with Duplicate Content Issues - 115
Broken URLs (Returning 404 Error) - 0
Broken Internal Links - 1
Broken Images (Images that do not appear anymore) - 16 images across 11 pages
Schema Markup
No Schema implementation present.
Wyndham City Council
The City of Wyndham is located in Melbourne's outer south-west, between 12 and 45 kilometres from the Melbourne GPO.
Speed
The fastest of the three sites with a Google Page Speed score of 83 and 74 for Yahoo's YSlow.
Given the size of the page sits at a whopping 2.16MB, the most obvious and easy to implement improvement could be to reduce the number of and size of the images. Implementing browser caching would be a big bonus for Wyndham.
Mobile
The Wyndham City Council website successfully passes Google's Mobile-Friendly Test with a separate mobile website. The site is a limited version of the full site to improve the speed and navigation experience.
Wyndham has chosen to use a consistent url www.wyndham.vic.gov.au and asking the browsers (Chrome, etc) to detect the device being used and serving the relevant site - Mobile or desktop.
Despite the separate mobile site and a high desktop speed score, Google's Page Speed score on a smartphone device is only 40/100. Whilst not the focus of the upcoming mobile update by Google we'd definitely recommend improvements to this.
Off-Site
Domain Authority - 48
MozTrust - 5.53
Referring Domains - 101,483
Google+ Local - Present but not optimised.
On-Site Optimisation (Home):
Home Page Heading Tags - Seven heading tags (Should be no more than 1). Of these six are wrapped around an image which Google can't decipher.
Home Page Meta Title - Home at Wyndham
Home Page Meta Description - N/A
Missing Meta Descriptions - 287
Duplicate Page Titles - 4
Broken URLs - 3
Pages with Duplicate Content Issues - 19
Broken Internal Links - 12
Schema Markup
No Schema implementation present.
City of Casey
The City of Casey is located in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs, between 28 and 60 kilometres south-east of the Melbourne GPO.
Speed
The City of Casey website scores 72 for Google's Page Speed and 63 for Yahoo YSlow. The home page is really heavy at 1.89MB but there is little gains to be made by optimising the home pages. In this instance the browser has to make 109 separate requests before it can render the page and this is approx double what would be considered ideal.
Mobile
The City of Casey site also passes Google's Mobile-Friendly Test with a separate mobile website. Case chooses however to serve that separate mobile website on a different sub-domain being m.casey.vic.gov.au. This is not uncommon but it does place them at a disadvantage because authority to the domain is diluted between the two.
The site scores 58/100 for smartphone devices using Google's Page Speed Test. Ahead of the mobile update this would be something to address.
Off-Site
Domain Authority - 50
MozTrust - 5.68
Referring Domains - 101,483
Google+ Local - Present but not optimised and a duplicate page exists. The Google+ page has had 630,671 views at time of writing.
On-Site Optimisation
Home Page Heading Tags - No H1 tag
Home Page Meta Title - Home - City of Casey
Home Page Meta Description - The City of Casey is a local council in the south east of Melbourne, Australia.
Missing Page Titles - 34
Duplicate Page Titles - 652
Missing Meta Description - 829
Broken Internal URLs - 31
Pages with Duplicate Content Issues - 158
Schema Markup
No Schema implementation present.
Summary
This is the first of such analysis of local council websites but I can already see some consistent issues with the state of the websites with respect to their SEO.
Mobile and Speed are two usability factors that are absolutely critical for search performance and we have varying issues and opportunities for the three sites. I love responsive websites but for a Local Council/Government website with so much content, it can be too much and for this reason I believe Whittlesea is well-placed with their set-up. However, all three have some changes to make to improve the speed of their sites with varying opportunities but for improvement. Much of which are technical code improvements and browser caching.
You would expect local councils to have a strong off-page profile and all three deliver in this regard. They all have a great deal of links coming into the site and despite this maintain a strong Moz Trust score. The one consistent disappointment with all three was their Google+ Local pages, which is a strong component of any SEO strategy. All three had not optimised their pages and I would assume they were created by Google having used White Pages data. When you consider the City of Casey has had in excess of 600,000 views, which could have been a great opportunity to engage with a user or send traffic to the website - It's disappointing.
The On-Page Optimisation of a Council site is one heck of a task to get right from the outset and even to maintain with what I would suspect are a lot of new and removed pages along with multiple users across departments adding pages. So I guess it's not that surprising that all three have serious issues. In regard to Schema Markup it's no surprise that this has not been implemented by all three as they have more pressing problems. However, it does present a great opportunity that is going missing. Council websites have a wealth of info that could be utilised by Schema and really make a big impact on their search results.
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