Now that it’s all over, 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 may be interested in what they had to say. The downside of this is that stray voters are unlikely to follow people from a party they despise, so most would be preaching to the committed. And a couple of candidates came spectacularly unstuck when their off-guard tweets were unearthed and exposed, so there are dangers inherent in these methods.
The Tories especially spent a lot of money getting Search Engine Placement by using ad-word campaigns on great numbers of keywords for sponsored links on almost anything to do with polical subjects in order to engage the attention of the voters. They also used an impressively inventive and technologically advanced method by making available an iPhone app which gave campaign news, policy details on different areas, made it possible to donate to the campaign 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 other parties missed a trick with that and will doubtless match them next time.
After a little investigation, it looks unlikely that the parties took on 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 the former Prime Minister officially announced it after Easter.
But it does seem a pity because the longer the election was uncertain, the more opportunity there was to be doing lots of off page optimisation and getting lots highly focused pieces continously published around the Internet, all of which could have helped get the party website a very high Search Engine Placement on the results page. Each party will have had dozens of specific policy areas, all of which could be the subject of pieces containing lots of relevant keywords included both generally regarding the party and specifically on the policy on a rolling basis.
Whether a Search Engine Optimization Company might have been specifically required or whether the party would prefer to do it themselves with people with specific knowledge writing the pieces and having strong party involvement on their cv, they could certainly have took on an SEO consultant to brief them on how to most effectively optimise the party website, where to publish pieces and how to get their point across into the results page of the search engines.
The earlier they had started prior to polling day, the more chance they would have had to produce a rolling and even output of pieces, both generally informative and reacting to news as they occurred.
It could be that the political parties are not yet as aware of the subtle benefits of search engine optimisation, as they are of the possibilities of Facebook and Twitter which are well known and prominent in the media. But there could well be a possibility 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 an opportunity to see whether potential voters would be more likely to follow an organic link from the results page as opposed to one which is obviously sponsored by the parties. Could be interesting!