Most users want to find answers about government policies and procedures fast. We would like to deliver info without asking our users to understand government structure. With SEO, we can reduce customer service colleague's time spent on phone calls, and emails.
Because of this, we must follow SEO best practices.
Educating Content designers
Reviewing each page before it goes live is impossible for the SEO team. Instead, we work with and educate our content designers on how to follow the SEO best practices.
- Central documentation is created for content designers
- Regular training sessions are carried out for content designers
- Provide guidance on migration projects
- SEO team always approachable for any questions
Topical information architecture (IA)
A good information architecture ensures:
- information is findable and understandable for users and search engines
- great user experience
- faster crawling and indexing of pages
- the risk of orphan pages are reduced
Unique page title
A great and unique page title is essential for NSW Government SEO success. The title is the first thing a user sees in the search results. It is also one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine a page's topic.
Structuring of content
Content broken into smaller paragraphs with headlines is easier scan and read. Google is more likely rank well structured content.
We tag the main Headline/Title with the H1 tag and sub-headlines with H2, H3, H4 and so on. The H2 sub-headlines will appear in the 'On this Page' section as anchors.
Auto-tagging in the Content Management System (CMS)
When creating pages in the nsw.gov.au CMS, the page title/headline is the Meta (SEO) title, and the page summary is the Meta Description.
Faster Page load speed
Pages loading fast have better on-page user experience. Google also ranks fast pages better for relevant queries.
Our team works on optimising the CMS platform for better speed. We also use Cloudfront content delivery network (CDN) to deliver vital information faster.
Technical SEO to improve nsw.gov.au
Technical SEO optimises website crawl, indexing, and rendering. This allows Google to better scan and rank our content. If we have serious technical SEO issues, we will struggle to rank high in search.
We have implemented and continued optimising the below items:
- Mobile-friendly website
- SSL Certificate
- XML Sitemap
- Utilising Robots.txt
- Improving Core-web Vitals
- Performing regular technical SEO audit and fixing site errors
- Optimising internal links
- Image Alt tags
- Canonical URLs
- Breadcrumb menu.
Auditing site and content before migrating
As part of the OneCX program more than 500+ websites will get migrated to nsw.gov.au. Our SEO team is responsible in reviewing migrated sites.
Our SEO team does discovery (pre-assessment) work on each site. During this phrase, SEO provides keyword and traffic information to the OneCx agencies. This helps them to make informed decisions during a content audit. After OneCX creates new content on nsw.gov.au, the SEO team audits the content to ensure that it is SEO optimised.
Be informed of new trends and features
We at NSW Government understand the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO). Google regularly changes their ranking algorithms to improve the user's search experiences.
We follow these changes to ensure they do not affect the our search visibility.
We also test new features appearing in the search results. This helps us to deliver our content the best possible way.
Need any more help?
If you have any questions, or require assistance with anything mentioned on this article, submit a request via the webform.