The Directgov review: time for a bit more thinking on SEO?

A review into the public sector online behemoth that is Directgov is being carried out, starting with the basics of its purpose and strategy. A sister company at work is helping out the review and the ever-cheerful Clare has more details of the review over on Transform’s blog.

As you can see from those details, the review touches on the age-old questions of to portal or not to portal, and to microsite or not to microsite? In other words, should you try to cram lots of features and information on one page / site or should you split the content over lots of pages / sites as appropriate? Directgov has, mostly, so far taken the route of trying to be a one-stop portal or provider for the online arms of the public sector.

The internet has moved on a long way since the early portal debates, most notably in the rise of search engines. For many people, their single page for finding the information they want about any part of the public sector is Google’s homepage (or anywhere else the Google search box appears).

The question isn’t “What should people see if they come to our public sector portal?”, it’s “What should people see if they Google a service?”.

Which gets me on to a trick that the public sector often seems to miss: search engine optimisation (SEO). Some parts of the public sector do a really good job on this. I’ve been particularly impressed with how often reputable health information from the NHS comes out higher in search results than questionable information from people pushing ‘treatments’ they sell. Yet good SEO  is by no means common practice, and even in the good corners, the ability of the public sector to use its whole weight to influence search results is often neglected.

Lessons from the Office for Budget Responsibility

Take the recent example of the Office for Budget Responsibility which I have blogged about. My own initial post about the Office for Budget Responsibility came out higher than the organisation’s own official site for a good while after it was launched. Yet the public sector has many high Pagerank sites it could have used in a coordinated matter to boost the official site right from the moment of launch. Both the 10 Downing Street and HM Treasury sites, along with others, could have provided prompt links rich in Google juice to boost the site so that people saw it above rather than below my own humble blog post.

As an added bonus, this sort of organic search engine optimisation does not incur any direct extra costs and once the processes for coordinating such work are in place, needn’t take up very much staff time at all as the public sector has such powerful assets to use. The different arms of a multinational frequently provide cross-links between their own websites, for example. Government departments based a few minutes walk away from each other rarely do.

So here’s my suggestion for the Directgov review: think about search engine optimisation and getting the best out of all those highly-linked reputable sites. In other words, worry less about what appears on the first page of Directgov and worry more about what appears on the first page of Google search results.