Merging councils puts your top Google result up for grabs
Fix guide · Search
The first search result is not on the council's website
Right now, residents who search Google for council tax or bin days land on their own council's website first. A merger, new domain or supplier change can quietly undo that. This guide shows how to check yours in 15 minutes and protect it.
0
of the 347 councils we checked in October had this problem on at least one page.
Source: UK council leaderboard, October 2026. Scored before the scoring fixes of October 2026. Compare only with months before November 2026.
Why it matters
When another site comes first, people may trust it over you. Some of those sites charge for things you give free.
What the problem is
When a resident searches Google for something like "pay council tax" or "bin collection day" with their town's name, the first result should be their own council's website. That is the result most people click.
This is one of the checks councils do best. Counties, districts, unitaries, metropolitan districts, London boroughs, and councils in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all do well on it, across every need we check, from council tax and bin collections to school places and adult social care.
So this guide is about keeping it that way. The risk comes with change. If the first result slips to another website, residents may:
- land on a neighbouring council's page and follow the wrong bin day or the wrong school admissions dates
- reach an old council's website after a merger and not know if it still applies to them
- end up on a third-party site that looks official, and sometimes charges for something that is free
- give up and phone you instead
Local government reorganisation, new domain names, redesigns and moving a service to a supplier's platform are the moments when this can go wrong. If any of those are coming up for you, this is worth an hour of your team's time before launch.
Why it happens
No council fails this check at the moment, so these are the things I would watch for, rather than problems we have found.
A new domain without page-by-page redirects
When councils merge or rename, the old website often redirects everything to the new home page. Google then loses the link between the old council tax page and the new one. For a while, another site can take the top spot.
The new site is hidden from Google by mistake
Test sites are usually set to tell Google "do not show this". If that setting goes live with the new site, your pages can drop out of results, and something else fills the gap.
A service moves to a supplier's website
Bookings, permits and payments often run on a supplier's platform. If your own start page is removed or thinned out, the supplier's page, or an unofficial site, can become the first result.
Two councils serve the same place
In two-tier areas, a county and a district both cover the same town. If your page does not say clearly which area and which service it covers, Google may show the other council first. The same can happen with neighbouring councils with similar names.
Page titles that do not match what residents type
If a page is titled with an internal name, such as a team or scheme name, Google has less to go on and may prefer a site that uses plain words.
A quick check you can do now
Search for the task in Google. If another site comes first, make your page title say the task in plain words.
Read the whole guide free
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- how to fix them, step by step
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Tests of your own pages every month, with a report for each one, so you can see the fix worked.
Stop it coming back. Start your story map at the Google result, and check each month that the right page is the one residents land on. Then add this fix to your improvement list and rank it with everything else. Read Step 4: How of the improvement plan.