The challenge

A major regional transport organisation was scoping out a new website after seven years of incremental updates to their existing platform.

The site functioned OK, but had been built upon without consideration for the overall user experience, organic search performance, or intended content design. This left the organisation with an outdated digital presence that wasn’t serving its users effectively, hence the desire for a new site.

Before it invested in a complete website refresh, the internal comms team wanted to understand how the site content performed against two key competitors. As the three largest businesses in the regional transport sector, offering the best experience to customers could be a key differentiator. The goal was to conduct comprehensive due diligence that would inform the scope and strategy for their new site build from well before its design stage or creation. This would give the organisation a solid digital platform built on a foundation of data rather than assumptions or gut feel, putting user needs first.

The work

Over the course of one month, I conducted a large-scale, multi-category audit that examined content performance across the site. The 1,500 pages were categorised by business priority, with the client’s four key services designated as critically important (totalling around 600 pages). The remaining content (older news, events, blog posts) was also audited, but with less priority ensuring comprehensive coverage while focusing effort where it would drive the most value.

Each service category received its own section in the final audit, complete with data-backed recommendations. The analysis revealed patterns across the site which weren’t unique to any section, and highlighted content neglect over the years:

Overall thin content: Pages lacked the depth and detail present on competitor sites, and compared to the level of info that customers expected. For example, where a major national competitor consolidated information about local areas, offered real-time updates, and service details onto a single scannable (yet comprehensive) page, my client had spread this information across three separate pages. Each page contained light snippets of information, creating a fragmented user experience and diluting search performance. Recommendations were made in terms of content consolidation, new content to add, and reveal instances where thin content had little value and could be removed.

Missing or misaligned content: Some high-volume search terms had no corresponding content on the site, while other pages focused on irrelevant or short-lived topics that didn’t align with actual user search behaviour. This was backed up by the on-site search revealing the most common search queries were often dead ends on the site, with no corresponding relevant content, often ending in a site exit. Content was specified to fill these gaps.

Technical barriers: A significant amount of key content users wanted to access was hidden behind a JavaScript app without an equivalent HTML version, making it impossible for search engines to discover and index this content, and very difficult for users to find ‘plain text’ versions of this that would be easily digestible/skimmable. Content was specified to supplement this app, to fill the gaps.

Useful localised and supporting content missing: Competitors employed strong supporting content such as local guides, things to do, and local attractions to give enhanced hyperlocal relevance in key areas they served. This type of content was entirely missing on my clients site and was suggested as an add-on once the new site had launched.

I walked the client through the findings, summarised into digestible slides and an exec summary. This was supported by detailed data spreadsheets containing raw data, categorisation, and filtering options to make it easy for the internal team to take action.

One of the key findings of the competitor analysis was that of 4,000 keywords analysed, the client ranked best for only 819, which left ample room to grow.

The findings are now being incorporated into the new website build, with the client’s internal team equipped with actionable and data-driven direction on which content to consolidate, prune, update, expand, or remove entirely. Rather than go into a new site build blind, with little data to back up decisions, and likely more focussed on design than anything, the organisation can build the site with strong foundations that will meet users needs, whatever they might be.

Achievements

The audit revealed significant opportunities for improvement: