The Internet has been playing a critical role in election campaigns since 2008. As people search the internet using search engines like Google, campaigns are also finding how search engine optimization can help political candidates?
Search Engine Optimization can help political candidates by helping politicians tackle smear campaigns against them, increasing voter turnouts, ranking political blogs of candidates higher, building narratives for important issues, collecting funds, and improving reputation among voters.
Tackling Smear Campaigns Using Search Engines
Politicians are most vulnerable to be the victims of online smear campaigns. When you are running for office, your opponents continuously pump up negative content against you on the internet. And when people search about you on Google, they end up landing on those negative search engine results. This is a nightmare for any political campaign.
You cannot expect voters to vote for you just after consuming a whole bunch of negative articles about you. This is where Search Engine Optimization comes to rescue politicians.
As a political candidate, you need to rank on the top of the most searched queries about you, so whenever voters search for you, they land on good and positive pages about you. When your campaign does proper SEO, you start getting traffic from voters, which helps you to protect your online reputation.
Almost all voters google the name of the candidate when they first learn about them. This is your best chance to impress your voters. And the best way you can do this is by ranking the positive content about you on Google against the search queries which people are searching.
Smear campaigns can be tackled using SEO with this strategy:
- Keep a record of the high-ranking negative content about you on Google.
- Get the list of keywords that are most likely to tarnish your online reputation.
- Create positive content about you, optimize it, and pump this content on the internet, and let it rank higher to replace the negative content.
Pro SEO Tip for Political Campaign:
Google prefers credible information on any topic. So you need to establish your authority on the topic on which you want to rank. This way, you can easily outrank your opponents.
Increasing Voter Turnout With Search Engines
Let’s accept the reality: bringing voters out of their homes on election day is a massive task. You will see that the voter turnout can even be less than 50% in many elections.
So why not use the power of search engines to bring voters out on election day?
During the election season, you will need to launch rigorous drives to bring the voters out of their homes. In order to do this, you need to ensure first that your voters are registered to vote.
Now, whenever voter registrations are open, your voters need to see your name again and again in google searches so that they make up their minds to vote for you.
Consider the case study of Bernie Sanders, for example. When he was running for the 2016 Democratic presidential primary elections, Sanders’s campaign managed to rank numerous pages related to him on the top places of Google against the keywords related to voter registration (see the below pics).
So a political campaign must craft a successful SEO strategy to get the best results out of search engines, especially Google for bringing the voters out on the election day.
Narrative Building Using Political SEO
Elections are a game of narratives. Whichever politician makes strong narratives end up on the winning side.
And you have to admit that making a narrative online is an art.
Whenever there is hot news about any topic, the public turns to Google to search for the news. And if your opposition is ranking their pages on the top Google queries, they will get all the traffic. Imagine that voters are searching for a specific topic, and your opposing candidate is successfully convincing voters that they are on the right side of the issue.
Your opposite candidate is using all the tactics to let your voters believe that you are not supporting the right cause. Eventually, all of your voters will be attracted to your opposition’s political campaign.
But when you do Search Engine Optimization for your political campaign, you start ranking on the issues that are dearest to your voters. For this purpose, you would need to do proper keyword research and find out the topics that are most talked about among voters.
And always remember that narrative building is a long process. You need to spend a lot of time winning the trust of voters using different narrative-building methods.
Narrative Building on Most Searched Queries on Google
An easy approach to making narratives using search engines is to make a list of topics that are dearest to voters in your country/constituency. Once you have the list, you need to start creating content around those topics and let them rank on Google. After a while, your content will be ranked on all the important keywords, which will help you in impressing your voters.
One of the easiest ways to find the topics based on their priorities is by using Google trends. Take this issue of the famous topics in any US election. (The data is taken from Google trends and is changed here in real-time).
Here you can see the topics which have been searched by voters. Start searching for the terms which are important for your voters, and this will be the beginning of your search engine domination.
Now see on this data of Google trends which we fetched about the 2020 US presidential election debates for all three debates. Right after all three debates, voters switched to Google and searched terms like “who won the debate,” among other likewise terms. Now, most of these people click on the first link that appears on Google, followed by the second and third links.
You see here how people started searching about the winner of presidential debate right after all the debates.
This means that the news ranking at the top of Google had the most views, and this was not possible without SEO. This is how political campaigns use search engines to manipulate voting decisions.
Building Brand Identity of Your Political Campaign Using Search Engine Optimization
Political campaigns are just like brands these days. Like businesses, campaigns also need to fix their reputation and make a brand identity for them. You are probably aware of the famous political slogans of Donald Trump and Barack Obama and how they became a part of the public discourse in the respective election cycle.
Obama is considered a man of different slogans, as his campaign introduced new slogans at nearly every event during his 2008 presidential run. Let’s look at some of the famous slogans of Obama.
- “Forward” — the official slogan
- “Greater Together” — youth vote initiative
- “Betting on America” — his bus tour
- “Yes We Can” — Campaign slogan
The only reason why Obama managed to win the support of the masses was due to the use of the internet in slogan marketing.
And what about Trump’s “America First” slogan that took many Americans by storm?
Trump’s success in slogans was also made possible since he managed to tie the slogan with the brand of his political campaign, which was not possible without the internet.
So the takeaway here is to make your own campaign identity and optimize that identity for search engines so that voters feel compelled to talk about it.
Ranking Your Political Campaign Websites and Political Blog Higher
Voters turn towards the internet – or specifically Google- when they want to know the position of candidates on various issues. And the best place to talk about these issues is your own campaign website.
If you are running a political blog while running for office, you could connect with all the voters easily. Your own political blog is your megaphone which no one can censor. You have all the liberty to express your opinion on your blog and let the voters know your stance on different political issues. When you do Search Engine Optimization of your blog, you start getting visitors to your site, thus informing them about your opinion on different issues.
There are two ways of making a political blog. First, you can integrate the blog into your political campaign website. Secondly, you can set up a dedicated blog on which you would only publish content related to different issues.
Political candidates who stand out in their campaign tactics have been blogging for a long time.
For example, Barack Obama is running a blog on medium, while other political candidates publish articles on various news outlets.
And see this example from Bernie Sanders’s website, and note how is he having his position on all issues on his website.
If you are a famous politician, you can publish your content on news websites with an already established audience. But if you do not have deep connections with the media, publishing your opinion on your own blog is the perfect way to go.
Improves Credibility and Trust Using Google
Search Engine Optimization helps political candidates establish trust with their voters. As search engine traffic is organic and not paid, this means that voters are likely to trust you more in this case compared to paid ads since they are reaching you themselves.
Google Analytics data also show that organic traffic is more engaging compared to social clicks where people are sometimes forced to visit a specific webpage.
Free Marketing of Your Political Campaign
Remember, SEO is free marketing. You only spend a few bucks on optimizing your website, but you end up ranking at the top of Google for a long time to come.
That is why SEO is so important for political campaigns since it is the cheapest form of marketing. Imagine you are spending hundreds of dollars for paid ads, organizing rallies, and connecting with voters, but leaving the SEO that is absolutely free marketing.
This will disturb all the finances of your political campaign as you are not spending your campaign money in the right direction.
SEO marketing is typically important for those campaigns which have no access to big funds. Since the use of money is on the rise in political campaigns, you need to find ways that are most economical, and SEO is one such way.
Fundraising With the Help of Google
SEO is also a great way for political fundraising. Politicians sell merchandise to collect money for their campaigns. And one of the best ways to sell political merchandise is to optimize your ecommerce store for search engines.
For this purpose, you need to get the keywords for merchandise that people are searching for. After that, you need to create the products around those keywords and put them on your ecommerce store. Your store will soon rank on Google, which means that voters will buy your political merchandise, which is a great way to fundraise.
Search Engine Manipulation Effect: A Case Study of How Online Searches Affect Voting Decisions
The use of search engines in political campaigns is not a new phenomenon. In 2015, famous US psychologist Robert Epstein coined the term “Search Engine Manipulation Effect.” According to him:
- Voters are highly likely to change their voting preference based on the findings of search engines.
- Even those voters who think that search engines influence voting decisions are vulnerable to changing their voting behavior after googling.
Final Words
Ignoring search engines during your political campaign is a dangerous move. It doesn’t matter whether you are running for a local election or a nationwide poll. Your best bet is to run your campaign on autopilot by optimizing your election campaign for Google.
Search engine Optimization will bring massive traffic to your channel over a period of time. And this technique best works to persuade undecided voters who can quickly turn against you by consuming negative information. But you need to remember that SEO is not an overnight process, which means that you need to kick off your search engine campaign as soon as possible to have your best shot at winning the elections.