The SERPs as an Election Battleground?
The US is light years ahead of us in its use of the web as a political tool. Even in the 2004 election, grassroots activity organised through blogs nearly managed to break the hegemony of the Republicans and Democrats. And this time round Obama’s use of the web as a rallying tool gave him the biggest warchest in political history.
There’s been an increase in political blogging in the UK over the last couple of years and it looks like this might be the first election where the SERPs become a political battleground. Following the Sun’s announcement this morning that they are backing the Tories, some wag at the Labour Party ran an AdWords campaign throughout the morning on the search term ‘labour’ – claiming that “The Sun was wrong on Hillsborough, and they’re wrong on the Labour Party” (although they’ve since denied this was an official Labour Party campaign).
This afternoon, The Sun have struck back – again on the keyword ‘Labour’ – publicising their switch to the Conservatives.
I suppose that this was inevitable, but it looks like the SERPs are going to become a keenly fought-over space over the next six months. I was over at Google for some AdWords shindig earlier in the year and sat next to a guy from a German company whose name I’ve forgotten who said that his company was primarily employed by the political parties to make sure that their sites (and therefore point of view) would rank for issues of the day. It’s an interesting notion that I don’t think any party in UK politics seems to have grasped – leaving the SERPs to be dominated by newspaper articles and scabrous comment from the blogosphere. Try searching for ‘public spending cuts’ and see if you can spot a political party anywhere in sight…
On which subject, if the Government or opposition parties are reading this, now is an excellent time to consider an SEO campaign to get top spots in time for the election 😉
Cheers
Paul
7 Comments
Amelia Vargo
Good point well said. The political parties of this country should grab hold of SEO campaigns if they want to get ahead.
Kyle - http://www.reviewopedia.com/google-adwork.htm
I think it’s relatively easy for political campaigns to succeed in SEO without really working hard on it. They simply have to put out news/controversial content which will quickly get picked up by the blogosphere with either praise from their side or rebuttals from their opponents side, either way they get lots of links quickly.
Paul Carpenter - http://www.itsafamilything.co.uk
Hi Kyle – I think you’re half right that it would be easy to do from a technical perspective.
The trouble is that all policy announcements get made primarily through the newspapers. Straight away the various papers put their slant on it, and then the blogosphere starts commenting. And then, eventually, there’s some kind of bullshit press release on the official website in pdf form, buried in a poorly optimised architecture and written primarily as an attack on the opposition position. So no prizes for guessing who gets the rankings.
You look at the Google Insights data for “public spending cuts” in the UK, you can see a massive opportunity to put an unfiltered argument in front of the public going to waste. How much do their spin doctors get paid?
DaveN
Did you see Cameron on BBC TV today kinda felt he just skated around a lot of Questions been posed to him
Paul Carpenter - http://www.itsafamilything.co.uk
That’s his job! 😉
Actually I heard him a bit on the radio this morning… and, yeah, I thought he was being evasive. Great!
Paul Evison - http://www.ccidistribution.co.uk
I remember you and I having the same conversation about 2 years ago when Gordon Brown was just on the brink of becoming Prime Minister. He was embarking on some sort of nationwide tour such that we would all feel great about him and his wierd smile, before he was inflicted on us…
The top results on Google for “gordon brown” at the time featured Charlie Brown (and Snoopy), Gordon the train from Thomas the tank Engine and some sort of German fetish site (if my memory serves me correctly!). Point being they were bad and did nothing whatsoever for his image
Anyway look at the listings now
http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&source=hp&q=gordon+brown&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=0s&oq=goron+&fp=55b1114b05e94ce9
Other than the estate agency, exactly the sort of banal results any politican would hope for…
Whether that’s because of a concerted campaign, luck or Google getting better I don’t know, but the picture has definatley changed.
joe - http://www.vacation4men.com
He has always been a fast thinker. He is good.