Political Campaigns SEO: Only Way NOT to Lose your Elections
A single political campaign – your political campaign - can be buried with hundreds of thousands of other similar campaigns in this busy world.
The only way to sort out this problem is to do SEO for your political campaign to boost your search rankings, which is extremely crucial to stay relevant and visible in today’s saturated digital market.
Importance of Political SEO
Political SEO is a critical element of any successful campaign and reputation management strategy. It controls candidates’ messaging and gives them leverage over the negative voices circulating all over the internet. First impressions matter and political SEO helps in making that positive. Thus, it should be an integral part of any digital marketing campaign.
Political Candidates are Vulnerable to Reputation Management Crisis
Any politician not ranking on the first position on their name is vulnerable to a reputation management crisis.
Whenever voters search for politicians, they can find articles filled with criticism or a Wikipedia page that could be crafted or modified by a political opponent.
If you google the term “Ron DeSantis,” who is the incumbent governor of Florida, you won’t see his official website anywhere on the first page of Google.
While the website of the Florida governor will pop up, that is the transferable property, and anyone assuming the charge will be the owner of that site.
The same was the case with Chris Christie back when he was the governor of New Jersey. His website did not come up with his name; instead, the first page was populated with negative content against him.
Had his political strategists acted promptly, who knows if he could have performed better in the 2016 Republican primary elections?
Political candidates closely monitor their online data, and they are likely to change their strategy with the passage of time.
Political SEO demands rigorous practices repeated over time to develop a trust with Google as the search engine giant believes in the E-A-T strategy, which stands for
E- Expertise
A-Authoritativeness
T-Trustworthiness
Thus you have to commit yourself as a politician to put repetitive content to be in the good books of Google.
Target Keywords that Matter in Your Political Campaign
While targeting long-tail keywords is a preferable approach at the beginning, politicians can even rank well on high volume and short keywords.
The intent of politicians for establishing a website is sure to mend their online reputation and win their elections.
So, they have to target a large number of voters, so they are at the disadvantaged end.
Take the example of “Chris Christie” for instance. Back then, his name had a keyword volume of over 90,000 per month, and with his site nowhere to be found, his competitors were taking all that traffic and feeding voters with negativity about the politician.
Open Your Eyes to Opposition’s Attacks
When you are in a political business, you have to recognize your opposition’s dark tactics immediately. If you are delaying your SEO strategy, your opposition can cook up a lethal blow against your election campaign.
In the 2012 election cycle, some political opponents of Congressman Markwayne Mullin launched a website named Mullinfacts.com and filled it with negative content.
Mullin’s team was well-prepared for this and launched a counter-offensive tactic to push this website down into Google results. Only a well-prepared campaign can do this; others will keep beating around the bush.
Not Getting Your Desired Search Ranking? Let's Fix It
Final Thoughts
Sometimes political websites can be hard to rank, especially for new politicians.
According to Google’s official words, political content can easily fall into the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) category; thus, it is qualified for higher scrutiny by the search engine.
Until or unless you start early and put up the content on your website, you are unlikely to make a mark before your elections.
So, start early, and develop authoritativeness with Google to boost your political campaign SEO.
