The Election and SEO

Unless you’ve been living in a hole somewhere deep underground (not that there is anything wrong with that) you’ll know that today is ELECTION day. The three main parties are fighting till the very end to get your vote. Live election debates, radio interviews, soap boxes, no media outlet has been untouched. However, the people of the UK are still undecided, many probably will be making their decisions at the polling stations. What does this mean for SEO you may ask? Well there will be many keywords out there which the main parties should or will be targeting, as there are still people doing their research via the internet. Let's concentrate on three main points which the parties have been debating about over and over again.

Keyword Used: Party Policies on Europe

Conservatives seem to have come top of the table for this term, with Labour a close second, scarily the BNP are not far behind, what I have noticed is that the Liberal Democrats aren’t anywhere to be seen on the first page of Google. Conservatives are also the only ones who have taken advantage of using PPC.

Keyword Used: Party Policies on Immigration

Conservatives have come up trumps on this key phrase again and again taking advantage of using PPC advertising, this may show the public how serious they are on these policies. Something makes me very unhappy, what you may ask? Well I’m seriously unhappy that the BNP are coming up nearly the top of Google, I know people don’t like to have other peoples political views imposed upon them, but in this case I think it's allowed. Labour is trailing behind the Conservatives on this phrase but not as bad as the Lib Dems as again I can’t see them anywhere on the first page of google.

Keyword Used: Party Policies on the Environment

You can see here, that none of the parties have taken advantage of using PPC, again the Conservatives have come up top, and we see for the first time the Lib Dems showing some fight on the SEO front coming ahead of Labour.

What could be the reason behind the Conservatives coming up top each time?  A small bit of analysis goes along way, I had a look at the party's inbound links and mozRank, for those of you who don’t know what mozRank is, mozRank shows how popular a page is on the web. The more links to a page, the more popular it becomes, however, links from important pages increase your popularity, and your mozRank, even more. So in the case below even though Labour has more links to their site the Conservative links will be more important holding more page authority.

Conservatives

Links: 70,000+

mozRank: 6.41/10

Labour

Links: 80,000+

mozRank: 6.36/10

Lib Dems

Links: 1,335

mozRank: 4.35/10

You can see from these few statistics as to why the Conservatives could be coming up top and Labour always not far behind and the Lib Dems losing the fight on the SEO front. I don’t know if the any of the above is a reflection on what will happen tonight in the election result, but by going by what I’ve found here today, SEO would predict Conservatives coming first, Labour Second and Lib Dems coming in last.