Content Strategy for Austin Water Utility

As the website manager and editor for Austin Water, I managed the content strategy for the AW Homepage to optimize the user experience of their most searched pages.

TYPE OF WORK

UX Research and Design, Content Strategy, Graphic Design, Content Production. SEO, Copy Writing, Accessibility

TOOLS USED

Figma, Drupal, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Google Analytics

DATE

2022

RESULT

Increased content organic traffic to Austin Water Utility’s “Report a Problem” and “Find Your Watering Day” pages.

Project Background

When I began this work, the Austin Water website had not reported any Google analytics results in over a year. The website had 200 active pages but many of them completely under searched or not viewed by the public. The reading score of the website was very low and the information was technical and dense. Austin Water relied on their homepage for all of their paid radio, tv, and social media ads but the homepage was not optimized for SEO, accessibility, and had no strategy for updating content. I mapped out over 200 separate webpages on their domain, and ran a content audit and created a new strategy for the most viewed (500,000/year) webpage: the AW homepage.

Data Analysis

Data showed that in the past 3 years, residents were most searching for information pertaining to emergencies or finding their watering schedule. Most residents were finding information on mobile and through organically searching on Google. The previous homepage included over 30 links (!) on it with only 2 links being the top searched links. 10 links on the Austin Water homepage were the least visited of all pages.

Results

I created a wireframe to share with Austin Water executives for approval after I presented my site analysis. I then worked with web developers to implement my new content structure. The new homepage has a much smaller portion of links but all links are the top searched pages on the website. The previous homepage had colors and graphic that did not meet WCAG web standards and now the new one does. Users are now able to find the pages they are looking for with one Google search.

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