Essential SEO Tips for Political Campaigns

What could be worse for a political candidate or campaign today than not having a website? The answer: producing a website that doesn’t work or that no one can find.

Search engine optimization or SEO is a way political marketers and campaigns can generate and boost content to make a site more attractive to search engines while helping targeted words and terms rank higher for user queries.

SEO is an essential part of modern political campaign strategy. While publications and pundits alike have gone on and on regarding social media’s influence on the modern political campaign, search rankings also help campaigns sway existing constituents and potentially new demographics.

Instead of classifying optimization as a part of a separate task, campaigns can rely on political SEO as a component of their overall branding and digital marketing strategies. Read on to learn more from our team at Reach Voters for some of our favorite methods to utilize SEO as a part of a political campaign strategy.

Optimizing a Campaign Website

Political campaign sites need optimization to increase online visibility. When voters deep dive into potential candidates and organizations, their official website should appear on top for specific keywords and phrases, followed by any associate social media profiles or pages. Many campaigns need to implement some key SEO elements into their political campaign strategy to accomplish this. These include:

Choosing a Domain Name

Choosing a domain name is essential to their ultimate success in the business world. Politics is no exception. Candidates and campaigns should choose a clean, succinct domain name that remains adaptable for print and may be usable in future campaigns.

A candidate’s or organization’s name remains the ideal solution in many situations. Nevertheless, campaigns should keep domain names short and memorable while also avoiding a year or elected position as these could become irrelevant in the future.

Title Pages Properly

A page title is an important search ranking component. Designers should create page title tags that relate to the page when designing a political website. Page titles serve as anchors that inform a user on a website they are visiting.

Most modern web browsers will only display the first 95 characters of a title. This is important to remember as browsers will crop page tags longer than 95 characters. Each page on a site should adhere to this soft rule and display its unique page title.

Create Interesting Meta Descriptions

Meta tags usually display as link descriptions on Google and Bing SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Designers must create unique meta descriptions for each page on a website as a part of their political campaign strategy.

These tags are intended to be brief, concise summaries of a page’s content and should include:

• A candidate’s or organization’s name, cause, position sought, and district or location
• A short one to two-sentence summary. Longer meta tags are truncated by the major search engines
• Unique, individual descriptions for every page active on a website, even when these meta descriptions and titles are similar or slight variations of one another
• Compelling page descriptions that are enticing users to click on the search result

Political Campaign Strategy and SEO | Reach Voters

Create content that works. Optimizing begins with a good domain name; however, this extends to creating enough unique, compelling content to keep readers interested as well.

Achieving a search engine ranking within the first page of results isn’t easy. Nonetheless, this can serve as a boon for an election and may differentiate between winning and losing.

Our team from Reach Voters is a full-service political branding, web design, digital marketing, and public relations firm that can assist with web development and SEO issues as a part of a political campaign strategy. 

If you want to improve your political content while optimizing your site and improving search rankings, reach out to Reach Voters and schedule a consultation to improve your digital marketing political campaign today!