📈 Case Study: Making critical COVID-19 information unmissable for a local authority
About the business
- Local authority website
- Informational content
Nature of the work
The challenge
During 2021/2022, a local authority had, like many others, comprehensive COVID-19 guidance for residents and businesses – information about support, service changes, the furlough scheme, and operational updates.
The problem was, nobody could find it on the website.
The most searched terms on the council’s website were COVID-related, yet the information was buried deep in the site. An inadequate internal search function with poor query matching and no result previews meant even motivated users came up empty-handed.
This meant that business and residents alike could possible miss the support they needed, and quality content went to waste during a prolonged period of uncertainty.
The council’s communications team wanted an audit of the content discoverability, usefulness, and overall effectiveness. This would provide them the ammunition they needed to sign off the required development changes, rather than making these decisions on gut feel alone.
The approach
A rapid content audit would feed in findings to the comms team who would work alongside its developers to prepare for implementation of any fixes. Looking at Google Analytics data (engagement, site search, visits from search), and Google Search Console (search performance, search visibility) a content inventory was taken, and user journeys defined to build an evidence-based case.
A content hub for COVID-19 was proposed, highlighting the most sought after information front and centre, so that the majority of site users could find the information they needed, as easily as possible.
Benchmarking against other local authorities revealed that while some had similar hub approaches, none matched this council’s content quality – making it even more critical to surface.
Working with the client, we prioritised homepage real estate, identifying what could move to accommodate what mattered most right now.
The work
Key analyses:
- Discoverability of content from search engines
- Performance of on-site search
- Performance of content once it was viewed
- Performance of content on the current homepage
Using this information flagged that:
- Content was discovered well from Google Search, but not the site’s own internal search, which was highly inflexible
- Performance of content once it was discover was generally satisfactory, barring some key examples where disparate but related content would be merged
- Some of the content in the primary position on the homepage was of little interest to most site visitors
Using this information, we proposed to create a COVID-19 hub with peak prominent placement above the fold on the homepage, organized into resident and business sections.
Despite CMS limitations requiring structured formatting rather than a quick-fix solution, we secured the most visible position possible. The audit’s data gave stakeholders the evidence needed to justify these changes during an emotionally charged time.
The council implemented recommendations quickly, transforming the content from buried to unmissable.
This ensured that residents and businesses within the area could find critical information they needed. At a time when uncertainty was at its highest and clarity was most needed, the audit provided the data to back up stakeholder thoughts, and improve content engagement on the site.
Achievements
Provided the critical business data that was needed to better promote the content
Bridged the gap between quality information and the residents/businesses who desperately needed it
Removed friction at a time when every barrier to critical information had real-world consequences
Key takeaways
- The proof of the pudding is often in the data and understanding this should be the basis for making wider decisions
- On-site search data is an incredibly useful tool to reveal user intent and often isn’t measured on sites
- Diving into one issue can often unearth several others (allow contingency time for this)
- When it comes to site content, ‘done’ is often not enough — publishing content without giving thought to how a user will uncover it will lead to poor performance