How users will find your content on nsw.gov.au
Our site offers multiple ways for your audience to find information, complete tasks or explore related content. Users could be citizens, businesses, visitors or public servants.
How site visitors come to nsw.gov.au
People come to nsw.gov.au with a specific goal in mind, and our Google Analytics data reflects that.
How traffic arrives at nsw.gov.au:
- almost half of users come through a search engine result (49.9%)
- 36.5% come to nsw.gov.au directly – by typing in the URL or clicking on a bookmark to a specific page
- 2.9% enter through the homepage
- 85.3% land directly on a page at least 2 levels deep
- only 5.4% have arrived after searching for a specific government entity
- other channels (such as other websites, email newsletters, social media and digital advertising) refer customers to information on nsw.gov.au
- a customer typically looks at 3 pages per visit.
Source: Google Analytics, 1 May-30 November 2025.
Helping people find government information
We want to make it easy for both our internal users (content publishers) and our site audiences to find information and complete tasks. Our information architecture (IA) aims to support usability, functionality and findability by clearly organising, structuring, labelling and linking content.
There are several different ways we support customers to find or explore our content.
Our goal is to ensure customers can easily find accurate, relevant information across search engines (for example Google, Bing) and AI-driven platforms (for example ChatGPT and Google Gemini). This ensures answers appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) and AI overviews.
The nsw.gov.au SEO strategy aims to help customers access the information they need – quickly and easily.
- SEO is a core focus during migration. We integrate SEO throughout the content lifecycle during our 3 migration phases:
- pre-migration SEO assessment
- before-go live SEO review, and
- post-migration SEO review to maximise visibility.
- Dedicated in-house SEO team focused on maintaining and growing visibility, ensuring crawlability, and strengthening technical foundations across agency migrations.
- Provide guidance and information on best practice to agencies during content migration to ensure consistency and optimisation.
The nsw.gov.au site offers an internal search feature designed to help users quickly find relevant information.
- Indexed content: Search results include content from publicly available pages from both nsw.gov.au and Service NSW domains.
- Search platform: The nsw.gov.au internal search is powered by Google Vertex AI Search. It is an enterprise search platform that uses natural language understanding and semantic search to give better results.
- Quick answer feature: Users see a 'quick answer' above their search results that is powered by Gemini, the Google Vertex AI Search large language model (LLM). It aims to understand query context and deliver an AI-generated summary with a direct answer to the user's question, without the user needing to click any further.
- Filtering options: Users can filter results with agency tags, for example NSW Fair Trading, and by topics, for a more precise navigation within their search.
- Search insights: Search activity is monitored by our SEO team to identify trending queries and poorly performing searches, to inform any content optimisation opportunities and gaps.
Most people looking for government services and information don't understand the structure of government.
To address this, we use topics as the primary navigation path on nsw.gov.au.
Our 21 topic pillars help structure, organise and label information in ways that make sense to our audiences.
The nsw.gov.au topics were defined and validated through user research, with focus groups totalling 500 participants representing a cross-section of the NSW customer base.
All content on nsw.gov.au sits within the topic area that fits best with users’ expectations.
Most content on the site also is also cross-linked from other relevant topics and pages. This gives users multiple entry points into the information, supporting different user journeys.
Our topic pillars
When an agency joins nsw.gov.au, they maintain their organisational presence through the Departments and agencies section of the site.
The Agency landing page template is designed to support agencies to surface key details, such as strategic priorities, news, agency-level contacts, annual reports and organisational structure.
It’s also a way to showcase all of an agency’s services and initiatives, linking through to topic-based content elsewhere in the IA.
In addition, all content throughout the site is tagged by agency.
This means details of the managing agency appear at the bottom of every page and as a filter on search. So, people can find and explore all relevant information by agency as well as topic.
nsw.gov.au provides personalisation features designed to improve user experience by delivering relevant content and services. These features leverage user behavior, location, and interests to guide the customer journey.
Audience targeting
Personalised experiences are tailored for primary audiences such as:
- citizens
- businesses
- visitors
- public servants
Secondary audiences, including home buyers and young people, can also be targeted for specific campaigns.
Testing and optimisation
The SEO and Personalisation team, supported by our digital agency, has the capability to:
- run A/B tests and multivariate tests
- implement experience targeting
- provide content recommendations.
These methods help improve engagement and relevance for key audiences.
Common personalisation activities
- Content recommendations: Dynamic suggestions based on user behavior, interests, and previous interactions. These use design components such as topic tags and cards to surface related content and guide the user journey.
- Location-based personalisation: Content tailored to a user’s region, ensuring they see services and information relevant to their local area.
- Custom activities: To enhance user experience, we have implemented features such as:
- countdown timers on pages like school holidays and public holidays
- browser language prompts to ensure content is displayed in the user’s preferred language.
Finding the right home for your content
When exploring where new content should sit on nsw.gov.au, the topics are subject areas.
They describe what the content is about.
Topics aren’t intended to describe who has published the content, or who the content is for. These functions are captured by content tagging. Learn about tagging content to improve search and filtering.