The case of the City of Vaasa:
Analytics and data at the heart of the City of Vaasa's website redesign
The City of Vaasa's website was redesigned in autumn 2019, when a common brand was created between the four organisations (the City of Vaasa, the tourism organisation Visit Vaasa, Vaasa Region Development Ltd VASEK and the Kvarken World Heritage Association).
The extensive website of more than 3000 pages provides information for residents, tourists, businesses and also serves as an internal resource for City of Vaasa employees. The website's content serves the Finnish and Swedish-speaking population, with key content translated into English.
The site is updated by more than 100 content providers in different departments of the city. The aim of the renewal was to provide content producers with accurate data on how the different target groups of the city search online for information related to the services offered by the Vaasa website.
The objectives of the collaboration were also to train the City of Vaasa staff to take search engine compatibility into account when producing quality content and to learn how to use web analytics independently.
All based on better service and user involvement
The new online service is the result of a unique collaboration at national level. The website was redesigned in a cross-municipal and cross-organisational collaboration. It is a joint online service for 8 municipalities and 4 organisations. In addition, the events calendar includes the offerings of 15 municipalities, thanks to the cooperation of the Ostrobothnian Regional Council," says Tiina Salonen, Project Manager.
A common online service will provide a better and more comprehensive service for residents, businesses and tourists, with easy access to all the services and events in the region. In the past, finding information required knowing the areas of competence and boundaries of the organisations, as well as browsing separate websites.
Although Vaasa's website redesign had been implemented in a very user-centred way, with user involvement, little attention had been paid to search engine discoverability or web analytics at that stage.
Searchability means better service
Citizens, tourists and business representatives all use search engines at different stages of the information-seeking process. If a city or municipality does not take search engines into account on its website, the customer experience of key target groups will suffer.
Vaasa's online communicators woke up to this fact and put Finnish digital search engine optimisation and web analytics agencies out to tender.
The search engine optimisation and web analytics services were the subject of a public call for tenders, for which several bids were received by the deadline.
"When choosing a partner, the focus was on how our needs were addressed in a holistic way", says Project Manager and Communications Planner Ilari Rautiainen.
"At the time of the decision, the participants were unanimous that Digiteam was the best option to deliver the project in line with the objectives.", Rautiainen continues.
In addition to the competitive package and price, the most important criteria were the solid experience of the project participants in similar projects.
Project objectives
The aim was to improve the findability of the site and increase the natural number of visitors to vaasa.fi.
According to Project Manager Tiina Salonen, the goal was clearly achieved, and the website project was more successful than expected.
The number of visitors to the site increased by +44 % over the seven-month reference period. In the tourism sections, the increase in the number of users was +118 %.
Good search engine accessibility is also seen as a driver of customer experience. If a user can quickly find the information they are looking for on a search engine and get the answer they need on a website, the user experience will remain good throughout the information retrieval process.
Web analytics harnessed to measure site usage
It must be possible to reliably measure the different sections of the website and to monitor progress based on selected concrete indicators of success. Urban websites are made up of quite large entities, each of which is responsible for a different function. Different functions such as tourism, community services and business services need to be able to reliably measure and report on their own aggregate data.
Content of the Search Engine Optimisation and Web Analytics project:
- Keyword analysis (analysis was conducted in Finnish, Swedish and English)
- Audit of analytics and implementation of KPIs
- SEO training for content creators and broader training for end users
- Analytics training for end-users
- Reporting Basics workshop at Google Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio)
- As a bonus, the project includes a Follow up to ensure that the different aspects of the project have been implemented as well as possible.
Client comments on a project that went well
"The keyword analysis and keyword tool we received were more comprehensive than expected and the different target groups of the city's organisations were very well taken into account.
During the project, meetings were held to refine the analytics needs and the result was an analytics definition that took into account each organisation's own KPI metrics and implemented the measurement.
The analytics workbook provided in advance served as a good reference material for the identification of KPIs.
After the training sessions, spontaneous praise was received from participants for the content of the training. All agreed schedules were adhered to throughout the project and cooperation was smooth and flexible in all respects."
Ilari Rautiainen
Project Manager / Communication Planner
Corporate Governance / Communication and Public Relations
