In April 2026, the Government Digital Service published a significant update to its GDS Local initiative, signalling a renewed national push for local authorities to modernise their digital presence. The message was clear: council websites that aren’t built to modern standards aren’t just a frustration for residents – they’re increasingly invisible to search engines too.
We’ve seen this first-hand. Town council websites that ranked confidently a couple of years ago have slipped dramatically in Google search results, sometimes by dozens of positions. If your council’s website is struggling to be found, you’re not alone. And there are specific, fixable reasons why it’s happening.
Why Google Is Demoting Town Council Websites
Google’s ranking criteria have shifted considerably. What worked in 2022 won’t cut it now. Here are the most common culprits we see when auditing council sites:
1 Core Web Vitals failures
Google measures how fast and responsive your pages feel to real users — things like how quickly the main content loads, whether the page shifts around as it loads, and how quickly it responds to a click. Most older council websites, built on outdated themes or with bloated plugins, fail these tests. Google treats this as a signal that users will have a poor experience and ranks the site accordingly.
2 Poor mobile experience
The majority of people now search on their phones, including residents looking up meeting times, bin collection dates, or planning notices. If your town council website isn’t fully responsive and easy to navigate on a small screen, Google penalises it. Many council websites were built before mobile-first design was standard — and it shows.
3 Missing or duplicate content
Thin content — pages with just a few lines of text — is a ranking liability. So is duplicated content, which often happens when meeting agendas and minutes are uploaded as PDFs without any accompanying text-based summary on the page itself. Google can’t read most PDFs effectively, which means those pages contribute nothing to your search visibility.
4 Lack of structured, keyword-relevant content
Generic phrases like “welcome to our council” tell Google very little. Modern SEO for town council websites relies on clear, helpful content that reflects what residents actually search for: things like “[town name] town council meetings”, “[town name] planning applications”, or “[town name] community events”. If your pages aren’t structured around how people search, they won’t appear when people search.
5 Accessibility and technical issues
Since 2018, UK public sector websites have been legally required to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standards. Beyond the legal obligation, Google increasingly treats accessibility signals — proper heading structures, descriptive alt text, logical page hierarchy — as quality indicators. A website that fails on accessibility is often one that also fails on SEO.
6 Outdated or missing metadata
Page titles and meta descriptions that are either missing, duplicated, or written years ago without SEO in mind make it very difficult for Google to understand what each page is about. This is one of the easiest fixes, but often the most overlooked.
The GDS Local Context: Why This Matters More Than Ever Right Now
GDS Local: Building the Foundations for Digital Collaboration
The Government Digital Service’s GDS Local initiative made clear that the government sees local authority digital services as critical infrastructure, actively working to reduce barriers to digital transformation — but the onus remains on each council to ensure its own web presence is up to scratch.
Search engines are how most residents find their council. If a resident searches for your town council website and can’t find it on the first page of results, they don’t dig through to page four. They give up, ring the office, or go without the information. That’s a service failure — and it’s entirely preventable.
What a Well-Optimised Town Council Website Actually Looks Like
A properly built, well-performing town council website will:
- Load in under 2.5 seconds on mobile, passing Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds
- Use a clear heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3) that matches what residents search for
- Have unique, descriptive page titles and meta descriptions on every page
- Feature regularly updated content: news, events, meeting minutes, and notices
- Be built on a platform that council staff can update easily without needing a developer
- Meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards throughout
- Include local, place-specific language that reflects genuine resident search behaviour
- Link clearly between related pages to help search engines understand site structure
None of this is complicated. But it does require a website built with these requirements in mind from the ground up — not retrofitted onto a template that was designed for a different purpose.
What You Can Do Right Now
If you’re a town clerk or councillor reading this, here are the first three things worth checking:
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Run a Google PageSpeed Insights test
Go to pagespeed.web.dev, enter your council website URL, and check both the mobile and desktop scores. Anything below 70 for mobile needs attention.
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Search for yourself
Try searching “[your town name] town council” and related phrases in an incognito browser window. Where do you appear? What do the results look like? Are your page titles and descriptions accurate and compelling?
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Check your content
Look at your key pages — home, about, meetings, news. Is there real, substantive content there? Or are key pages mostly empty or reliant on downloadable documents?
If you’re not happy with what you find, it’s worth having a proper conversation about what a modern, well-optimised council website should look like.
How Zonkey Can Help
We’ve spent nearly 15 years designing and developing websites, and over recent years we’ve focused significantly on the specific needs of town and parish councils across the UK. We’ve built websites for councils from Sidmouth to Buckingham, Frome to Faversham — and we’ve seen what separates the sites that perform from those that disappear.
Our dedicated council website service is built specifically for this sector: WCAG-compliant designs, WordPress platforms any council staff member can update, UK-based hosting, and ongoing support. It also means sites that are structured to be found.
Photo by Arkan Perdana on Unsplash