Last week the budget was making headlines and stirring up a big fuss, you might expect a quick Google search of ‘budget live’ or ‘Budget 2010’ might bring up the official Prime Minister’s website
www.number10.gov.uk but in fact it doesn’t even appear in the top 50 for either of these phrases.
Being an agency that prides ourselves on SEO we had a further look at the website to understand what the problem might be to avoid ever doing it ourselves and see just why the government couldn’t get a decent SEO agency.
The Downing St website, under further inspection appears to have incredibly poor SEO, with simple bad practices like no ‘title tag’ or poorly optimised articles with no keywords or descriptive text. A loser look at the general SEO of Number 10 shows the brand getting lost, the official YouTube channel is located at
www.youtube.com/downingst rather than /number10 and both refer to the visual content as ‘number10tv’ even though a Google search for that term definitely doesn’t find what your looking for.
Gordon Brown’s tweets come from
@downingstreet rather than @number10 or @10downingst. All of these are fundamental basics for creating a digital presence for a brand and you might have thought the British Government could have done a little better than this.
Many companies will also buy up important URLs to redirect to their website or to prevent their competition from buying them, incidentally both www.number10tv.com and www.number10tv.co.uk are both up for grabs. We suspect Gordon Brown might want to sack his in house SEO, but if its an agency, their business is going to take a huge hit.
At Prodo, we don’t make those kinds of mistakes, we are pro’s.