Responsibilities

Lead the overhaul of a key citizen-facing website and improve core attributes.  Focus areas: on-page and off-page SEO, optimize content for better findability.  

 

Research Methodologies

• Usability labs

• Focus groups

• Contextual inquiries

• Surveys

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Site Challenges

• Outdated CMS

• Poor user experience

• 7 levels of navigation

• Non-functional modals

• Mobile-displayable, not mobile-first

• Extremely outdated and heavy. overexplanatory content

• 4 content management systems (DNN, Squarespace, Joomla, WordPress)

• Poor SEO focus - the obvious mistakes had been around for a dozen years

    
Improvements

• Upgrade to a new CMS version 

• Added tracking tools (Screaming Frog, Raven, Google Search Console)

• New image library established - people who looked like our audience 

• Rewrote SEM quality content

• Mobile friendly

• Sitemap with highly indexable pages

• Established a governance control process for editors

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End-User Value

• Immediate SERP improvement with Google re-crawls

• Clean and concise page descriptions and title tags

• SEO optimized - broken links, 301 redirects, 404-page errors, fixed

• Bounce rate improvement

• Time on-site 50% increase

• Search feature enhancement

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​Wrap Up

These improvements laid the groundwork to migrate to a single CMS.  Site migration cut deployment time in half.  What came out of this effort was a new and improved user interface, and an impactful design, intuitive navigation, an effective search feature, shortening the time users spent previously finding the valuable information they needed.  Measuring performance daily and remediating issues quickly allowed us to pivot quickly and effectively serve our 25,000 daily users.   

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