SEO covers all strategies that can be used on a website to help it be active higher in search engine results. Smaller political campaigns generally underutilize SEO as a cost of helpful way to drive a message and save on ad spending. This absence of planning is a disgrace, as SEO is a completely free way to gain exposure to voters. Like any other section of a campaign, SEO should be addressed strategically so that maximum results can be achieved with a campaign’s limited resources.
The main portion of the strategy must be defining the keywords that are important to your race. This should be include combinations of the candidate’s name and the office he/she is running for, along with combinations including generic political terms and issues that people may search for. To get knowledge of the kind of search volume your terms generate, you can use the Google Keyword Tool. It will also suggest keyword variation that might be useful. It can be a challenge to measure volume since importance in a campaign can be low initially. A good tip to control kin importance of keywords early in a race can be to check you generic terms for a higher profile race. Once you have defined your keywords, you need to complete on your strategy.
Start your website early.
See the results from an SEO campaign takes time at a minimum a couple of months. The early you start your strategy the better off you will be. In a political campaign, typically the site is being built from scratch as well. This means to facilitate a new domain will likely be used and Google will need to index and rank it for the first time. We just launched politicalprachar.com and got all kinds of awesome inbound links but it still took Google a month to give it a rank.
By regularly updating a blog, a campaign will continually be adding additional content to Google’s index. This content will make it easy for guests to find the campaign’s site through a keyword search. Additionally, a good blog will inspire supporters to be more active and possibly blog about the candidate themselves generating links to the campaign site.