A council press office spends a busy afternoon publishing a page about a new recycling collection schedule. It is accurate, it is timely, and residents genuinely need it. Three months later, the team discovers most residents still find out about bin day changes from a leaflet through the door, because the page they wrote never showed up when anyone actually searched for it. Nobody had ever explained to that team what search engines needed from the page to find it in the first place.
Key Takeaways
- Council communications staff publish constantly, but publishing is not the same as being found; search engine optimisation is a separate, learnable skill.
- Residents search using their own words, such as “when is my bin collected,” not council department language like “waste collection schedule amendments.”
- Local government pages compete less with commercial businesses and more with each other, and with old, outdated versions of the same page still ranking.
- A short, practical training session for comms staff usually covers page titles, plain-language headings, and keeping local details consistent across the council’s own site.
- Training that sticks tends to be hands-on and specific to the council’s actual website, not a generic slide deck.
Council communications teams sit in an unusual position. They publish high volumes of genuinely useful public information, under real time pressure, without the marketing resource a private company of similar size would have. That combination makes SEO training worth doing properly rather than skipping, because the cost of a resident not finding accurate information is not just a missed click, it is a phone call to a call centre that is already stretched.
Why council pages often struggle to be found
The single biggest gap on council websites is language mismatch. Council staff, understandably, write in the terms their department uses internally: “waste collection schedule,” “council tax band appeals process,” “household support fund eligibility.” Residents type what they actually want to know: “when is my bin collected,” “can I appeal my council tax band,” “help with energy bills.”
Search engines are reasonably good at bridging small gaps between these, but a page that never uses any version of the resident’s actual phrasing, in the title or the main heading, is working against itself from the start. This is entirely fixable without changing the tone of the writing or the accuracy of the content. It simply means checking, before a page goes live, whether its title and main heading contain a phrase a resident would recognise.
A council office worker updating a webpage on a desktop computer
The competition is often the council’s own old page
Unlike a business competing against rival companies, a council page is frequently competing against an earlier, outdated version of itself, one that was never removed or redirected when the service changed. A resident searching for the current bin collection calendar can easily land on a page from two years ago that still ranks well simply because it has been live longer and has more links pointing to it.
Sorting this out is less about writing new content and more about housekeeping: redirecting old pages to their current replacement, and being consistent about which page is the single authoritative version of any given service. Comms teams rarely think of this as an SEO task, but it is often the single highest-impact fix available to them, because it stops search engines from ever showing the wrong answer in the first place. A simple spreadsheet listing each service page, its current owner, and its last review date is usually enough to keep this under control once it has been set up properly.
The biggest SEO problem on a council website is often not a missing page. It is an old one that never got redirected.
What a session for comms staff should actually cover
A worthwhile SEO session for a council communications team should be built around the council’s own site, not generic examples from a training slide deck. It should cover how to write a page title and heading that use resident language rather than department language, how to check whether an old page needs redirecting before a new one replaces it, and how to keep an address, phone number, or service name consistent everywhere it appears on the council’s own domain.
pomegranate has delivered sessions along these lines directly with council teams in Enfield and Waltham Forest, working from the council’s actual published pages rather than hypothetical examples, because that is what makes the training transferable the next time a page goes up. Anyone weighing up whether a similar session would suit their own team can get in touch with the team at pomegranate to talk through what a session covering both SEO and web content would involve.
Local government staff in a meeting discussing a website project
Measuring whether the training actually changed anything
The clearest sign that SEO training has worked is not a leaderboard of rankings. It is a comms team that, six months later, is still writing page titles that match resident language without needing to be reminded, and that has a working habit of checking for old pages before publishing a replacement. Search visibility for high-traffic seasonal pages, bin collection changes, school admissions deadlines, council tax information, is a reasonable thing to track over time, but the habit matters more than any single number.
It is worth setting expectations before the session starts. SEO changes on a council website, like anywhere else, tend to show measurable movement over weeks rather than days. A comms team that understands this going in is far less likely to write the whole exercise off after the first quiet month.
There is also a resourcing point worth raising with senior management before the training happens rather than after. A comms team that has been shown how to fix titles, headings, and redirects still needs the authority and the time within its normal workload to act on that knowledge. Training delivered without that follow-through tends to fade within a few months, not because the staff forgot it, but because nobody protected the hour a week it takes to keep applying it.
A resident using a laptop at home to look up council services
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do council pages sometimes rank worse than they should?
Often because the page uses internal department language instead of the words a resident would search, or because an older version of the same page is still live and outranks it in search results.
What is the fastest fix available to a council comms team?
Auditing and redirecting outdated pages that still rank ahead of the current, correct version. This is usually quicker to do than rewriting content and has an immediate effect.
Should council SEO training be generic or specific to the council’s own site?
Specific. A session built around the council’s actual published pages transfers far better than one using unrelated example websites, because staff can immediately see how the advice applies to their own work.
How long before a council sees a change in search visibility?
Most meaningful movement takes several weeks rather than days, particularly for pages that have been indexed for a long time with an established position.
Does a council communications team need ongoing SEO support, or just one session?
A single well-run session, focused on habits rather than one-off fixes, is often enough for day-to-day publishing. Larger structural issues, such as a full page audit, may need a separate piece of work.