Political SEO is a resource few SEO companies manage to tap, as it’s a highly specialized activity. In this post I plan to shed a little light on this subject, untouched for some reason by most SEO’s. There are a few particularities unique to this kind of SEO, as there are multiple factors to be considered. I won’t give away all our trade secrets, just setting the base for a broader article - hopefully soon to follow.

First of all, the first problem refers to the type of client. The usual customer would be a candidate. Sometimes, the client can be a political party. The candidate customer would be the most difficult one, as there are two diverging considerations: the time factor and the image factor.

The time factor: it’s obvious, election day is D day. So by that time, your client should dominate the Web with his message. The plot thickens when you need to take into account the law in various countries, and the moment your candidate decides to get into the race. While in most countries the timeframe is of about 3 months, there may be cases when you only have one month from decision to D day. Time for miracles :). The less admitted fact of political SEO is that most of the time operatives must be literate in black hat SEO, because it’s a battle with well known competitors. You need to know very well both the attack and the defense.

The image factor: obviously your customer has an image to maintain in the public’s eye. Engaging in obvious Black Hat tactics, while giving fast results, can always backfire ahead of time, or will discredit him in the long term, as your promoting sites become invisible for Search Engines. There are solutions to this - but you need to be aware of the dangers!

The most used techniques include the all classics: link-wheels, social marketing, press releases, articles. Google Bombs are usually present in the picture, so a plan to defend yourself from them would help a lot. Geo-targeting is a must, as most customers only want to reach electors from a given area, saving resources for the offline campaign, but such a headache for the online one. All bets are off, so PPC will have to play a vital role in this also.

This will be revisited, we promise!