Now that it’s finished, and many will breathe a sigh of relief, the time has come to look back at how the election was fought and what may happen next time around (7th May 2015 according to William Hague).
We know that all the parties have been using Online Marketing methods. By using Social Media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, they have been able to communicate with local parties, activists and supporters as well as anyone else who have an interest in what they had to say. The downside of this is that stray voters are unlikely to follow people from a party they dislike, so most would be preaching to the committed. And a couple of candidates came spectacularly unstuck when their off-guard tweets were discovered and exposed, so there are dangers inherent in these methods.
The Conservatives in particular spent heavily getting Search Engine Placement by using ad-word campaigns on huge of keywords for sponsored links on almost anything to do with polical subjects in order to get the attention of the electorate. They also used an impressively inventive and technologically up to the minute method by releasing an iPhone app which gave campaign news, policy details on different areas, made it possible to donate to the election fund as well as tilt-and-see swing-o-meter to display how many seats would be secured depending on the percentage of people switching their vote to blue. The missed a trick with that and will doubtless have them next time.
After a little investigation, it looks unlikely that the parties engaged a Search Engine Optimization Company to help with the campaigns to the same extent. There may be good reasons for this, the main one of which was that no one could be certain of the exact date of the election until Gordon Brown officially announced it after Easter.
But it does seem a missed opportunity because the longer the election was put off, the more opportunity there was to be doing lots of off page optimisation and getting lots highly focused articles constantly published around the Internet, all of which could have helped get the party site a very high Search Engine Placement on the results table. Each party will have had dozens of specific policy areas, all of which could be the subject of articles containing lots of relevant keywords included both generally regarding the party and specifically on the policy on a ongoing basis.
Whether a Search Engine Optimization Company might have been specifically required or whether the party would prefer to do it themselves with people who have specialised knowledge writing the articles and having strong party involvement on their cv, they could certainly have engaged a Search Engine Optimiser to brief them on how to most effectively optimise the party site, where to publish articles and how to get their point across into the results table of the search engines.
The faster they had started prior to the poll, the more chance they would have had to produce a ongoing and constant output of articles, both generally informative and reacting to events as they occurred.
It could be that the political parties are not yet as aware of the subtle benefits of SEO, as they are of the possibilities of Facebook and Twitter which are well known and prominent in the media. But there could well be potential before the end of the next Parliament to get in quickly and make an early start with the Online Marketing for the next general election campaign. Rehearsals and toe-dipping exercises could also be done as the next set of local elections is due to be held in 2011 and 2012. These would be a chance to see whether potential voters would be more willing to follow an organic link from the results table as opposed to one which is obviously sponsored by the parties. Could be interesting!