One of the most important components of any political campaign is your website.

Your political campaign website is your candidate’s brand representation on the web – for many voters it will be their first and often only point of contact with your campaign.

But what good is a great political campaign website if nobody can find it?

During a campaign, there is nothing worse than links from your website being buried in an organic Google search.

So, to help your website trend much better – here are three tricks to get your political campaign website to top Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines.

You want to work smarter – not harder!

Trick 1: Primary Keywording

This is really just good SEO practice rather than a “trick”, but it is critical that you choose a set of five or so primary keywords, and carry them through every text field on your entire website.

Your primary keywords and key phrases should be the search terms that your constituents are most likely to use when looking for information regarding the election your candidate is competing in.

For example, if I was running for a City Council seat in Ward 9, which was in a City called Springfield and an area of the city know as Greensborough – most voters would search for something like:

“Springfield council election”

“Greensborough councillor”

“Greensborough council candidates”

And so on.

Most voters would not use the term “Ward 9” or be overly sophisticated in their search terms, so it is important to tailor your primary keywords and key phrases to what voters would most likely search for.

Once you have identified your primary keywords and key phrases, it is important to weave them into every text field throughout your website – from text in articles to titles to photo names to categories and tags.

And don’t forget to include your candidate’s name as one of your primary keywords!

Trick 2: Use Your Opponent’s Name and Party As Keywords

This might sound counterintuitive, but if done right, this trick can give your website a huge boost in search engine rankings.

The more people who click on links to your website from Google and other search engines the more relevant the search engine thinks your website is, so the higher it ranks.

The reality is that not everyone will be searching for your candidate or your party – but by including your opponent’s name and/or party on your website, you will be feeding your opponents supporters links to your website – which in turn improves your search engine ranking with every click!

This can be especially effective when keywording photos – with a little consistent effort you can flood Google’s image search for photos of your candidate and your supporters even when users are in fact searching for your opponent – thus making your campaign appear to have a big surge of momentum.

However, you have to be careful with this technique if your candidate is not easily recognizable – if you are too successful voters could think that your candidate is actually your opponent – since it’s your candidate’s photo that pops up when they search your opponent’s name.

In this case, just keyword photos and graphics that can be immediately identified with your campaign – like this:

Trick 3: Link Your Website With Your Social Media Accounts

In addition to relevance, Google and other search engines also reward websites that are updated on a regular basis with higher search rankings.

Basically, the more active you are on your website, the higher it will rank in an organic search.

On the campaign trail, constantly updating your website can be a real hassle.  Writing articles and posting photos to a website takes a lot of time and effort – if you have a small campaign team, that effort that should probably be spent knocking on doors.

However, if you have a WordPress political campaign website, there are a number of tools that make it really easy to automatically link your website directly to your various social media accounts.

(Click here to learn more about building a political campaign website with WordPress).

For example, both Twitter and Instagram can be linked to your website so that every time your campaign team posts a new Tweet or photo, it is automatically posted to your campaign website as a new blog post.

This keeps your website continuously active, and it adds valuable keywords and tags on an ongoing basis.

As an example of what we mean – the blog posts on this website titled “Easy Photography Tip!” are automatically generated and posted directly from the author’s Instagram account!

Need Help? Just Ask!

If you have any questions about the tips in this article, please leave a comment and we will try to help you out (or contact us for a quote if you want us to take care of it for you).