Abstract:

Purpose: The website is the foundation of electronic administration. A website that has been search-engine optimised has a better potential to reach users. The purpose of the paper is to assess the degree of search engine optimisation of local government websites in Lesser Poland. Design/methodology/approach: The research covered 182 websites. The website quality was measured with selected automatic testing tools. Each test gave a final synthetic score. The scores were aggregated with zero unitarisation. Findings: The investigated websites scored 1,007.5 technical SEO points in total, which is about 55% of the available points. The websites demonstrated a significant potential for search engine optimisation (in the employed research design). Research limitations/implications: A significant variance in technical SEO attribute scores urges in-depth analysis of results offered by each tool. Practical implications: The synthetic technical SEO score identifies websites in need of in-depth quality analysis or an SEO audit. Such an analysis will pinpoint trouble attributes requiring optimisation. Social implications: A large number of relatively easy to fix errors and technical flaws suggests that municipalities do not audit their websites. Insufficient knowledge regarding weak points of municipal websites can hinder the development of e-administration. Originality/value: The research approached the websites from two browsing perspectives, desktop and mobile. Such a design facilitated a comprehensive investigation of technical attributes of the websites. The results were presented as statistics and in spatial terms.