What municipal websites supply and citizens demand: a search engine optimisation approach
| Pages | 7-28 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-02-2018-0042 |
| Date | 11 February 2019 |
| Published date | 11 February 2019 |
| Author | Carlos Serrano-Cinca,Jose Felix Muñoz-Soro |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management |
What municipal websites supply
and citizens demand: a search
engine optimisation approach
Carlos Serrano-Cinca
Faculty of Economy and Business Administration, University of Zaragoza,
Zaragoza, Spain, and
Jose Felix Muñoz-Soro
Aragonese Foundation for Research and Development, Aragon, Spain
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to analyse if citizens’searches on the internet coincide with the
services that municipal websites offer. In addition, the authors examine municipal webpage rankings in
search engines and the factors explaining them.
Design/methodology/approach –The empirical study, conducted through a sample of Spanish city
councils, contrasted if the information that can be found on a municipal website fits with citizens’demands.
This has been done by comparing the most-searched keywords with the contents of municipal websites.
Findings –A positive relationship between the supply and demand of municipal information on the internet has
beenfound, but much can stillbe improved. Analysedadministrationsrank the basic dataof the organisation,as
well as some of the fundamental competences thereof, at the top in search engine s, but the results are not entirely
effective with some keywords still highly demanded by citizens, such as those related to employment or tourism.
Factors explaining internet ranking include the number of pages of the municipal website, its presence in social
networks and an indicator designed to measure the difficulty of ranking the municipal place-name.
Originality/value –The results obtained from this study provide valuable information for municipal
managers. Municipal websites should not only include information in which citizens are interested, but
achieve accessibility standards, have a responsive web design, and follow the rules of web usability.
Additionally, they should be findable, which also requires improvement in terms of the design of the
municipal website thinking in search engines, particularly in terms of certain technical characteristics that
improve findability. A municipal website that wants to have a good positioning should increase its contents
and attain the maximum degree possible of visibility in social networks.
Keywords Search engine optimisation, e-government, Internet ranking, Municipal websites
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Public administrations offer information and online services to citizens through their websites,
improving their transparency (Tirado-Valencia et al., 2016), allowing interaction on social
networks (Gandía et al., 2016), boosting the semantic web (Muñoz-Soro et al., 2016) and even
enhancing e-democracy (Fietkiewicz et al., 2017). The number of citizens that connect to
municipal websites is becoming greater and greater; in fact, municipal websites are the most
common channel through which citizens communicate with governmental agencies (Ebbers et al.,
2016). In the European Union, the percentage of individuals using the internet for interaction with
public authorities is about 48 per cent, with a maximum of 88 per cent in Denmark (Eurostat,
2017a, b). But doubts have arisen when attempts have been made to determine if citizens’
demands coincide with what municipal websites offer, and also if municipal information is easy
to find through the use of search engines. The main objective of this paper is to contribute to
solving these doubts; and, to this end, three research questions are tackled.
Online Information Review
Vol. 43 No. 1, 2019
pp. 7-28
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-02-2018-0042
Received 4 February 2018
Revised 23 April 2018
12 July 2018
Accepted 17 July 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
The analysis reported in this paper was supported by Grant ECO2013-45568-R from the Spanish
Ministry of Education and Science and the European Regional Development Fund and by Grant Ref.
S-14 (3) and S-86 from the Government of Aragon.
This paper forms part of a special section “Social media mining for journalism”.
7
What municipal
websites supply
and citizens
demand
Testing how local governments respond to their constituents’priorities should be an
important focus of research (Einstein and Kogan, 2016). Hence, the first research question
analyses if that for which citizens search coincides with what municipal webpages offer.
Perhaps citizens are worried about issues like job searches, leisure possibilities, or the
procedure necessary to procure a grant; however, often suchinformation does not appear on
the website, or, if it does appear, it is not easy to find, even throughthe use of internet search
engines. Municipal websites, especially those of a small size, usually exhibit deficiencies in
many aspects (Gandía and Archidona, 2008; Feeney and Brown, 2017). This first area of
research is exploredby means of “keyword tools”, resourcesprovided by main search engines
regarding the search average conducted for a keyword in a determined period of time.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) aims to achieve that a given website appears in the first
position when a search involving specific keywords is employed by users (Evans, 2007).
The study of Baye et al. (2016), which analysed 12,000 search terms used by 2m users on top
retailers, confirms the importance of carrying out SEO actions, because most users find a
website due to a search engine. Although there are no equivalent studies applying to municipal
websites, it seems reasonable to think that, if city councils offering services to citizens want to
attract tourists to their municipality or simply want to publish their history, they cannot only
focus their activities on the creation of content or the design of questionnaires, but also have to
worry about the positioning of their websites in search engines. Therefore, the second research
question aims to analyse the positioning level of municipal websites. In order to answer this
question, it is possible to simply introduce the keywords that best define the m unicipal
competences into a search engine and then write down the positions they occupy. Although it is
a laborious activity, it is possible to automate this process using SEO tools.
The third research question has to do with the factors that explain internet positioning.
Although the algorithms employed by the main search engines are not known in detail, the
fundaments of the one used by Google were published in a conference (Page and Brin, 1998), and
some empirical studies have analysed factors that determining the positioning of websites
(Baye et al., 2016; Moreno and Martinez, 2013; Evans, 2007; Luh et al., 2016; Su et al., 2014).
According to such studies, a website’s contents are a key aspect for search engines, both in terms
of quantity and quality. Thus, it is expected that municipalities with a solid website, one in which
both competences are reported and online procedures are possible, will rank top in search engines.
Other hypotheses have to do with the extent of an organisation’s social networks presence, the
receiving of backlinks –links from other websites –and the difficulty of positioning certain terms
that have very high competition. The identification of factors that favour positioning could help
policymakers to improve municipal websites –such factors including transparency, citizen
participation, the interoperability of the information, accessibility, usability and findability.
This paper makes various contributions. Numerous studies have analysed municipal
websites, especially the disclosure of financial information (Armstrong, 2011; da Cruz et al.,
2016), the use of social networks (Bonsón et al., 2012), or their accessibility (King and
Youngblood, 2016). This research proposes a methodology to contrast if the information
available on a municipal website fits with citizens’demands, comparing the most-searched
keywords with the contents of municipal websites. We consider that findability should be
one of the quality attributes of a municipal website, a line of investigation in which the work
of Kopackova et al. (2010) on Czech municipalities stands out. The use of SEO tools is
proposed in order to monitor the internet positioning of municipal websites. Furthermore,
two indicators have been designed in order to measure the difficulty of positioning a
municipal website, starting with the number of webpages indexed by Google as belonging
to the public administration, the number of inhabitants of the municipality, and the number
of results obtained when searching the place-name of the municipality in Google. Finally, the
drivers of positioning have been analysed –an aspect that has previously been studied for
online shops (Su et al., 2014), but which we apply to the case of municipal websites.
8
OIR
43,1
To continue reading
Request your trial