Projects.

Utah State Parks

Website Business Strategy Consulting,
SEO Research, Analysis, & 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 we recommended focusing on only one of them for the initial phase of the project. This would give the Marketing Team a chance to learn a great deal about the State Park website system, while gaining valuable experience on managing a website development project. Yet the project scope for improving the park's search engine ranking was small enough that it posed no risk. What we proposed was a prototype project.

The park selected by the State Park Regional Manager was the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum.

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 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 are low compared to other parks in the Four-Corners area, such as the Anasazi Heritage Center, Mesa Verde, and Monument Valley. They want 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 technical issues that were causing ALL of the Utah State Parks to have very low rankings in the search engine results. The reason was that there were over 15,000 deprecated, legacy files remaining from a previous website system. Because they were older they were coming up higher, so they were clicked first, and so they continued to climb higher in the search results. Meanwhile, the newer matererial was being ignored, and so it continued to drop farther and farther down.

The webmaster took the opportunity presented by this project to remove the old files. He also added keywords to the index (Home) pages of all the parks and made additional updates of his own, which 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. Because we are not on the closed list of pre-approved contractors for the state contract being used for the project, we are 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.

Completed: November 2006

Technical Notes:

All of the Utah State Park websites are maintained in a single MySQL database, and use the same PHP website design templates.