Utah State Parks SEO Pilot Project
Business Website Analysis and Consulting, SEO Research, & Web Development
In September 2006, we were asked to provide website business consulting services for the Utah State Parks Marketing Team. The team has been mandated by the Governor of Utah to increase the State Parks' economic self-sufficiency, and also to increase their support of nearby local economies. They specifically requested help improving the State Park website rankings in search engine results.
There are over 40 parks in the Utah State Park system, and none of the Marketing Team members had any experience with website development at that time. We therefore proposed using one park as a prototype project, to give the team members, including the State Park Regional Manager, the chance to learn as much as possible while avoiding the potential risks of a large, expensive project.
We explained that this smaller project would give the Marketing Team a chance to learn a great deal about the State Park website system, while gaining valuable experience on how to managing a website development project. They didn't even know how to hire a webmaster. The scope for improving the park's search engine ranking was small enough that it posed no real risk. Our proposal was accepted.
The park selected by the State Park Regional Manager for the prototype was the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum. Although located close to a main highway, the museum continued to have problems increasing their visitor numbers, and the Manager thought it was a good first candidate for our project.
Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum, Blanding UT
Edge of the
Cedars State Park Museum
Edge of the Cedars is a Utah state park devoted to the Ancestral Puebloan ("Anasazi") cultures of the Four-Corners region. The park contains both unexcavated and excavated ruins, a world-class research facility and library, and one of the largest collections of Ancestral Puebloan ("Anasazi") artifacts in the world.
Edge of the Cedars is located on the outskirts of Blanding, UT, which is a very small town in the desert about 75 miles south of Moab. They are located just off Highway 191, which carries all north/south traffic in this remote region. However, their visitor statistics were very low compared to other parks in the Four-Corners area, such as the Anasazi Heritage Center, Mesa Verde, and Monument Valley. They wanted to use the Web to help increase their visitor traffic, but they were buried several pages down in the search engine results.
Our SEO research uncovered several major technical issues that were causing ALL of the Utah State Parks to have very low rankings in the search engine results, not just Edge of the Cedars.
The main issue was that there were over 15,000 deprecated, legacy files remaining on the web server from a previous website system. Because they were older they were coming up higher in the search results. So they were clicked on first by users, and continued to climb higher in the search results. All the contents were out of date.
Meanwhile, the new up-to-date files were being ignored because they were further down in the search results, and they continued to drop farther and farther down.
The webmaster took the opportunity presented by this project to remove all of the old files from the state park system. He also added keywords to the index (Home) pages of all the parks, and made additional updates of his own. This immediately began to improve all park rankings in search engine results.
We worked closely with the webmaster and the Edge of the Cedars staff, who provided the exhibit materials that we used to update their website.
Conclusion
Our final project report was used by the Marketing Team to write the Request For Proposal to improve an additional dozen parks in a similar fashion, and eventually the entire state park system. Unfortunately, because we were not on the closed list of pre-approved contractors for the state contract being used for the project, we were not eligible to respond to the RFP ourselves. However, we are content. We know that the Marketing Team learned enough during the Edge of the Cedars project to launch the larger project with much-reduced risk.
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