NeboWeb's CEO explains that politicians need to be more vigilant about their web presence-- focusing particularly on paid search and SEO.

Despite the millions of dollars spent on advertising on both national and local elections, most politicians lose out on arguably the cheapest and most effective online advertising medium-- Search Engine Marketing (SEM). I know many people will tout the power of the bloggers and mention that it is a virtually free online marketing vehicle, but blogging is largely equivalent to preaching to the choir. The real power of online marketing is in search engine marketing, which accounted for over 5.6 billion searches in July 2006 alone.

And, very noticeably, there is a lack of major politicians in the search engine results for keywords that people search on. The well-known exception to this, of course, is the undesired results the White House (www.whitehouse.gov) gets when you type in "miserable failure" in Google, providing a #1 listing to the White House's bio for George W. Bush. This brings up SEO PR, which politicians haven't harnessed either, but that is for a different article.

Search Engine Marketing includes two components: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC). Search Engine Optimization is the act of altering a website so that it does well in the organic search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and more. PPC is where an advertiser pays an agreed amount (usually auction-based) for each click someone makes on a link leading to their website.

In other words, both SEO and PPC are online marketing efforts to make your website show up in the search engines when someone types in a keyword. So, if you were a politician like Hillary Clinton or John McCain, you would probably want your site to be ranked for a whole host of terms like "national security," "Iraq war," "War on terror," and many more. Below are some keywords and their estimated searches per month:

As you can see by the above numbers, the amount of traffic potential is staggering. It seems incredible that major politicians are not putting out their messages on their key positions through the search engines. If someone is motivated enough to type in a search on immigration reform, then, I as a political candidate, would want you to read my position on this issue on my website. The ramifications of this are tremendous from a volume standpoint, but also from branding and positioning perspectives.

Moreover, there is better news (or worse, given the lack of online marketing for the major politicians) in that besides the organic, SEO-driven traffic available, each of these candidates could launch geo-targeted campaigns via PPC. For example, Google AdWords allows geo-targeted campaigns that can target countries, states, cities, and more. This means that you can buy keywords (nationally or locally) and only have those ads show up in the chosen geo-targeted areas. 

This could not only help major political candidates, but local ones as well. Small town mayors, school board candidates, etc. could run online marketing campaigns on major keywords targeting their particular town or region. The search volume would be lower given the smaller geographic footprint, but the chance to attach their campaigns to hot button issues is tantalizing. Localized search engine marketing campaigns are already heavily used by small- to medium-size businesses.

Besides the potential exposure that candidates are missing out on, the cost for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is substantially lower than traditional marketing efforts as measured by many reputable sources. Below is a snapshot of a "Cost of Acquisition Across Different Channels" analysis by Piper Jaffray, and as you can see, SEM cost of acquisition is cheapest by far.

Google is the dominant search engine, and most SEM firms focus on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. AOL gets its results from Google, so the effort put forth by Search Marketers in Google pays dividends beyond its search engine as it powers AOL, and a host of other engines. The chart below shows the percentage of online searches done by U.S. home and work web surfers in July 2006 that were performed at a particular search engine.

 
What does all of this mean? First off, it means our politicians are not web-savvy when is comes to marketing. SEO and PPC have been red hot in the business community for a number of years, and the fact that no major candidate has generated a buzz in this arena is not easily understandable. It also means that whichever candidates that can get their marketing teams to focus on and be successful with Search Engine Marketing will probably give themselves a major boost in coming elections. It could also mean that we as voters could start getting politicians to clarify their positions and start putting meaningful content online, as one of the keys to successful search marketing is relevant content.