When planting a garden, it takes continual watering, pruning and fertilizer to help it grow. Once the garden has bloomed, the best know that the work isn’t done. Without careful tending, leaf petals will wilt, weeds will form, and a once colourful ecosystem will soon suffer from neglect.

Place marketing websites aren’t too different, where they usually launch with much fanfare as a colourful statement of a city, region or country. But they often only receive that initial phase of watering before the weeds start to form, flowers begin to turn brown and the online “garden” enters a stage of disarray for the long term.

C Studios and our colleagues at DCI have evaluated hundreds of investment promotion and talent attraction websites, and search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most neglected aspects we find. Why is this important? We know that executives and top talent conduct research online and, if they can’t find the right information about your city, region or country, they very well could end up deciding to go elsewhere. How do we know?

Our Winning Strategies in Investment Promotion report identified that 7 out of 10 executives don’t contact an investment promotion agency until after they’ve already made crucial decisions like forming a short-list, indicating that they’re researching this information on their own. They also spend time on the internet and IPA websites during these searches, as the survey data shows.

SEO for talent attraction is equally important. Research on talent relocation indicates a similar reliance on digital platforms like Google search to research information well in advance of moving, even outranking personal experience visiting a destination. All of this is to say, potential customers are in the marketplace without you knowing about it. The best place to reach them is where they are spending that time – on search engines trying to find the very information your place provides.

While SEO can get quite technical, below are the most common SEO issues we have found that are impacting the user experience and the ability of pages to rank well for EDOs and IPAs. Do you want more website traffic from the right people? It's time to take SEO strategy seriously and see your organic traffic increase. (And don’t forget to read our advice on staying current with your online reputation.)

No Meta Tags

Meta tags provide data about your page to search engines and website visitors. They are picked up in searches as the main description of the content on your site and scraped by social media when posting shareable links. Quite simply, meta tags make it easier for search engines to determine what your content is about, an essential component to healthy organic search and getting “discovered.” This is best done after a thoughtful keyword research process.

Meta tags also ensure the right people are visiting your site and getting the content that they need – and keeping people who aren’t relevant off your site. This impacts engagement time, which can help or hurt where your website ends up in search engine results as well.

No Image Alt Tags

The image alt tag or “alternative tag” describes an image and/or what it is trying to convey to the person visiting a page. Like meta tags, it can help search engines better understand your content and its relevance so it can be discovered. When done well, it can provide a boost to ranking better for keywords that relate to your city, region or country by providing additional context to web crawlers.

Additionally, image alt tags are also critical for website accessibility. We can all agree that a description of “Software development team working on AI project” is better than “Image185,” right?

Incoherent or Confusing Site Structure

Any website should have a logical site structure and navigation pathway to lead users to the information they need. Without it, search engines and their crawlers can’t understand what your content is about and most human users will struggle to do the same.

Want people to find the right information to make accurate decisions about your location? And want to improve search results so your website appears higher than others (a problem we caught during C Studios’ own site selection process)? Make sure your website is organized and logical. Think of the site structure like an outline for a report – similar content grouped together with complementary link extensions.

Lack of Internal & External Links

Taking site structure to the next level is internal site linking, which helps crawlers and human visitors to your page logically pass from page to page by hyperlinking text that describes what someone can find elsewhere.

This is especially useful when there’s a blog referring to content elsewhere on the website and visa versa to drive traffic to your evergreen blog topics. Page views per session should rise with this approach, helping to keep users on your site for longer and connect them with valuable information. It's also important to include external links to other authoritative websites, like media coverage and partners, to improve your credibility with search engines.

Incorrect Header Tags

This is a sneaky one, but important. Header tags are used to separate headings and subheadings on a webpage and are organized from most important (H1) to least (H6, although usually only up to H3 or H4 are needed). Their intent is to make content more digestible and organized, boosting engagement and understanding (and helping search engines to understand the page better).

But sometimes web pages end up over-designed, which results in multiple H1 headers on a single page. While the penalties for this aren’t what they used to be for SEO, it’s still not an ideal set-up and we’d suggest avoiding the reliance on H1 headers.

Investing in SEO by fixing these issues can have a significant impact on your FDI or talent recruitment strategy. Executives and talents can more easily find your city, region or country during their location searches while they are actively looking for this information (as we did in our own site selection search).

It can be time intensive and detail-oriented. But in talking with executives and talents in the past, they research locations and search for jobs online like the rest of us. Getting and staying on the short list may depend on whether your IPA shows up when they’re actively looking.

Need a partner? Get an SEO audit in 30 days or less, complete with a technical and content analysis along with tiered recommendations for implementation and improvement. C Studios is offering a special price on these through the rest of 2023. Contact us here to inquire.