If you’re trying to get a political website off the ground, you must know how to master SEO. All content-based sites need to have SEO down since most of them will be getting their traffic from search engines and paid advertising methods such as PPC or media buying don’t really work as well for them.
The good news is that you can optimize a content-based website without too much effort. As long as you understand some of the basics of SEO, everything else is really about following best practices and being consistent. Let’s look at some essential SEO strategies for political websites.
Produce Content in Many Formats
One of the things you must do is make sure that you don’t only stick to one form of content. A lot of political sites will focus on the written word principally when they should be releasing videos and infographics as well. You could also create extensive PDF reports. They might not give your website direct link juice, but they will boost its profile and brand mentions, which will eventually benefit you.
The more content you have on different highly relevant and authoritative channels, the more benefit you’ll get. So, try to disseminate as much content as possible on as many platforms as you can by reaching out to owners and administrators and trying to build a relationship with them.
Use Other Marketing Methods
The more visibility your site has, the more it will get mentioned, so try to ramp up your marketing efforts by using different methods. SMS marketing can be a great tool for a political website. It can be used to notify people of new content on your website or to raise funds for it. If you want to see how political organizations have been using SMS marketing to raise funds, you should check out this piece on WinRed fundraising from Tatango.
Organize or Sponsor Events
You might be asking yourself what organizing or sponsoring events has to do with SEO. But organizing events will allow you to get press coverage, which will again boost brand mentions. Press coverage is very important when it comes to SEO, and the more you get, the more your site will start getting attention on search engines.
Holding an annual event or contest will also help you build your brand. So, look at what kind of events around your city you could sponsor. Make sure that they align with your base too.
Boost On-Page SEO
You also need to know that the way your site is designed and even your web host could affect your search engine rankings, so you might want to have your site audited to see where you need to make changes. You might have to improve your navigation, for instance, or use better keywords. You may also have to move to a different type of hosting or web host if yours is too slow as speed will affect your site’s SEO. Doing things like changing the format on your site’s image to make them lighter and easier to load will also help.
If you want your political website to gain traction on search engines, follow these tips. If you do everything right, you should start seeing results after a while if you stay consistent.
