I’ve seen lots of posts over the years about how political campaigns should be using SEO principles as part of their overall effort. I’ve always agreed that would be a good idea if done tastefully and ethically, but dismissed the idea as those ideals are very rare in the political circles.

Now, with the Presidential Election fast approaching we’ve decided that we will offer our services specifically to political campaigns, with the stipulation that we will not do anything unethical or otherwise ’shady’.

So what can we search engine optimization actually do for political campaigns? Quite a bit!

Our main focus in these campaigns will be working to ranks our clients for keyword associated with big issues for the 2008 election. We already know the Iraq War, and the War on Terror will be a big part of this. Another hot button issue is Universal Health Care. Working with politicians to promote certain listings relevant to these searches can be a great way to increase the level of communication between the representatives, and the represented.

I’ll be giving updates about projects related to this post as we move forward. We’ve been in talks with some campaigns, and if all goes well we’ll have some interesting stories to tell.

One question I see a lot on SEO forums and blogs is, “How can I increase my click thru ratio on Adwords?” What’s alarming to me (and wonderful for Google) is that the most common answer I see on these forums is, “increase your bids.” Not to say that increasing you bids and raising the placement of your ads won’t improve your click thru rate, it just happens to increase your costs per click, which we all know can greatly affect the ROI of the campaign.

So let’s rethink the question. What we need to ask is, “How can we increase click thru rates while maintaining the same cost per click or even lowering the cost?” I know you’re thinking that you can’t increase results and lower cost with a pay per click campaign. This is supposedly the unattainable Holy Grail of search engine marketing. Well, we’ve found it, and we’re even going to share.

Our approach to increasing click thrus is Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing different ad copy with Google can be labor intensive to get up and running. And without a PhD in statistics, you won’t be able to make sense of the numbers without some sort of automation. That’s what we offer. Our web based proprietary software syncs with your Adwords account and allows you to test 54 variations of your text ad for every keyword in your campaign. Our system will identify the top performing variations and provide you with easy to understand reporting, allowing you to adjust and refine your marketing efforts.

You’re probably thinking, “That’s great, but I don’t see how this will actually lower my cost per click.” You’ve got to remember that Google rewards ads that perform better. By simply increasing your click thru rate Google will actually lower your average cost per click, saving you money and increasing your ROI.

For more information about our multivariate testing for Adwords click here, and if you’d like to speak with a representative please contact us today!