One Search Bar, 14 Departments: How a Mid-Sized County Unified Its Digital Estate in 11 Days

County government sits at the intersection of everything residents need most: property records, health services, permits, courts, elections, and social services. Yet for most counties, the digital infrastructure that serves these needs was built department by department, CMS by CMS, with no thought given to what a resident actually experiences when they arrive at a county homepage and try to find something. A mid-sized county in the Southeast decided to fix that. Eleven days later, every resident had one search bar that covered all 14 departments. Sixty days after that, 38% fewer calls were coming in about information already on the website.

The County

The county serves approximately 280,000 residents across a mix of urban, suburban, and rural communities. Its 14 departments include Planning and Zoning, Tax Assessor, Tax Collector, Health and Human Services, Parks and Recreation, Public Works, Sheriff, Clerk of Courts, Supervisor of Elections, Property Appraiser, Emergency Management, Building and Permitting, Animal Services, and the County Manager's Office.

Each department maintained its own website, managed by a designated staff member — often an administrative coordinator with other primary responsibilities. The county had no central web team and no shared CMS contract. Six departments used one CMS platform, four used a second, two used custom-built legacy sites, and two used hosted microsite tools. The result was a digital estate with no consistent navigation, no shared search, no unified brand, and no way for a resident to search across all county services from one location.

The county's main switchboard and 311 line handled approximately 9,200 calls per month. A call categorisation exercise conducted by the county manager's office in Q3 2024 found that 3,496 of those calls — 38% — were information requests: residents asking questions that were answered on at least one of the 14 department websites. The per-call cost, including staff time and overhead, was calculated at $9.40. The annual cost of answering questions already published on the county's own websites was $394,621.

The Problem in Practice: Which Department Do I Search?

The most direct way to understand the problem is through the resident experience. A homeowner wanting to add a room to their house needs information from three separate county departments: Building and Permitting (what permits are required, how to apply, fee schedule), Planning and Zoning (setback requirements, lot coverage limits, zoning designation), and Property Appraiser (how the addition will affect their assessed value and tax bill). This information existed on three different department websites, each with its own search, none of which returned results from the other two.

A resident who didn't know that their question spanned three departments — the majority of residents — would typically: arrive at the county homepage, use the search bar (which searched only the homepage content, not any department site), get irrelevant results, click through to what seemed like the right department, use that department's search, find partial information, not know what they were missing, and eventually call. The call would route to a staff member who would answer the first question and, if the resident knew to ask, explain which other departments they needed to contact.

"We had residents calling us about permit fees, and during that call they'd find out they also needed to talk to Planning about setbacks, and then they'd need to call the Property Appraiser. Three calls for one project. None of those conversations needed to happen — all the information was online. The problem was they couldn't find it without us."

— Director of Building and Permitting

Why the County Chose a Unified Search Approach Over a Portal Redesign

The county's IT director and county manager's office had discussed a full portal redesign — a unified CMS migration that would bring all 14 department sites under a single platform with shared navigation and search. The scoping exercise produced a timeline of 18–24 months and a cost estimate of $1.4 million for vendor selection, migration, content restructuring, and training. The county commission declined to fund it.

The unified search approach solved the same resident experience problem — finding information across all 14 departments from one place — without requiring any department to change its CMS, migrate its content, or modify its existing website structure. Each department's site continued exactly as before. Keyspider simply indexed all 14 sites and made them searchable from a single widget on the county homepage and on each individual department site.

Deployment: 11 Days Across All 14 Departments

The county signed the Keyspider contract on a Monday morning in October 2024. The implementation team began that same afternoon.

Days 1 through 3: Keyspider's crawlers were configured for all 14 department sites simultaneously. The sites used four different CMS platforms and two legacy architectures — none of this required special handling. By end of Day 3, all 14 sites were fully indexed: approximately 11,200 content pages and 1,840 downloadable documents, including the 680 PDF forms across the Building, Planning, Tax, and Health departments that contained most of the detailed procedural information residents searched for.

Days 4 and 5: Relevance tuning. The county's IT coordinator worked with Keyspider's implementation team to configure department attribution labels — ensuring search results displayed the originating department alongside each result — and to set up the county's 18 most common query topics as a tuning test battery. The test battery was drawn directly from the call categorisation data: the 18 most frequently called-about information topics were used as the first-pass quality test for the search results.

Days 6 through 8: Department-by-department acceptance testing. Each department's designated website contact was given a 30-minute slot to review search results for queries relevant to their department, flag any issues, and confirm that their highest-priority content was surfacing correctly. Twelve of 14 departments completed their review with no required changes. Two departments — Planning and Zoning and the Tax Assessor — identified outdated content pages outranking current ones for specific queries. These were resolved by end of Day 8 through a combination of content updates (two pages were genuinely outdated and needed to be updated regardless) and relevance configuration.

Day 9: ADA Title II accessibility review. The county's ADA compliance coordinator ran a structured keyboard navigation and screen reader test on the search widget across three browsers. All criteria passed. The coordinator's sign-off was filed with the county attorney's office as part of the county's documented ADA compliance record.

Days 10 and 11: Deployment. The unified search widget was embedded on the county homepage and on each of the 14 department homepages via a single JavaScript snippet added to each site's header template. For the six departments on the shared CMS platform, this was a single template change. For the others, department website contacts made the snippet addition themselves — the change took under 15 minutes per site. The deployment was complete by midday on Day 11.

Results at 60 Days

Call Volume

At 60 days post-deployment, monthly call volume to the county switchboard and 311 line had fallen from 9,200 to 6,950 — a reduction of 2,250 calls. The county's call categorisation methodology distinguished between information requests and case-specific calls: information request volume fell from 3,496 to 2,167, a 38% reduction. Case-specific calls — those requiring staff access to case records, scheduled appointments, or escalation — fell 4%, consistent with no direct intervention in that category.

The categories showing the largest reduction were permits and planning enquiries (down 44%), tax and property information (down 41%), and health and human services information (down 36%). These were the three highest-volume categories in the pre-deployment call data and the three departments whose content was most frequently searched across — a resident's home addition project touching Building, Planning, and the Tax Assessor simultaneously was now answerable from a single search.

Cross-Department Discovery

Search analytics showed that 34% of all searches conducted through the unified widget returned and clicked through to results from a different department than the one the resident was currently browsing. This cross-department discovery rate — residents finding relevant content in another department's site that they would never have found by navigating from where they started — was the clearest evidence that the deployment was solving the problem it was designed to solve.

Resident Satisfaction

A satisfaction survey on the search results page collected 820 responses in the 60-day post-deployment period. Overall satisfaction was 91% — residents rating the search as 'easy' or 'very easy' to find what they needed. The open-text responses highlighted one theme above all others: residents expressed surprise at the ability to search across all county departments from one bar, and relief at not having to navigate to the right department before being able to search.

What Came Next: Search Analytics as a Content Gap Tool

An unanticipated benefit emerged from the search analytics dashboard. The county's IT coordinator began reviewing the zero-result query log weekly — searches conducted by residents that returned no results. The log was, in effect, a direct window into what residents needed that the county's published content was not providing.

In the first 60 days, the top zero-result query categories included: information about the county's home energy efficiency rebate programme (which existed but was not yet indexed because it lived on a microsite not included in the initial crawl configuration), current road closure and maintenance information (published in press releases but not structured as searchable service content), and food assistance referral information (which the county didn't publish directly but could add as a resource page linking to state programmes).

All three gaps were addressed within 30 days of identification. The energy efficiency microsite was added to the crawl configuration. Road closure information was restructured as a dedicated service page updated weekly by Public Works. A food assistance resources page was created and published by Health and Human Services. Each of these changes reduced zero-result searches for those topics to near-zero within days of publication.

"We used to guess at what residents needed on our website. Now we can see it in exact language, every week. The search analytics have become our content planning tool. We've published more genuinely useful content in the past two months than in the past two years."

— County IT Coordinator