The official online gateway for Scotland
What did the Scottish Government do when it decided in 2007 that it wanted a gateway portal website for Scotland? It turned to Whitespace! Why? Because for the previous five years we had built up an unrivalled body of content about Scotland targeted to the diaspora and disseminated under the banner of Friends of Scotland. This initial website for The Scotland Office included a monthly e-zine carrying multiple stories of Scottish excellence and endeavour.
Ostensibly Friends of Scotland was an international membership organisation that was designed to leverage the immense worldwide power of the Scottish diaspora (and others with an affinity to Scotland) across the areas of business, education and culture via an online networking base – in some ways it was a Scottish precursor to the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn and Whitespace had been the creative energy behind the initiative from its inception.
It was obvious that this e-zine content could be used to help maximise Search Engine Optimisation for the Government agencies that are responsible for tourism (VisitScotland), business (Scottish Development International), work (The Relocation Advisory Service) and study (The British Council in Scotland). When the various agencies were on board, research was conducted and the scotland.org domain name was acquired for what became known as the ‘official online gateway to scotland’.
“Scotland.org visitor number grew by over 500% in the first year and directs over 10% of its traffic to partner sites.”
In fact the project was reasonably straightforward. Four main sections were created for the areas of Work, Study, Visit and Business, all supported with information and articles about Scotland. All this was underpinned by a consolidated SEO plan uniting disparate activity across the partner sites.
The site also features an innovative ‘tag engine’ that allows short text-based promotions to be automatically applied to site content based on that article’s content.
Since the site was launched in May 2007, visitor numbers have grown year on year and dwell time on the site is a respectable five minutes.
