Since mid-July, there has been a significant upturn in the number of searches for both “obama economy” and “mccain economy:”
Google Trends: Searches for "obama economy" and "mccain economy"
These searches reflect the obvious and growing questions about how the candidates would handle some very hairy situations in our banking and financial system today. Let’s see what the top results are on Google for each of these searches – to see who is capturing and controlling these terms.
“Obama Economy”
Today’s Google results for this term couldn’t be much more beautiful for the candidate.
Google results for "obama economy"
Here, we see Obama’s own website at the top of the sponsored results, as well as the #1 spot for the organic (non-paid) results. Other results near the top include ontheissues.org (which seems to be a non-partisan provider of candidates’ positions) and a fact-checking website from the St. Petersburg times. Next, we see two YouTube videos of the candidate speaking out on the economy, and a raft of recent news articles with titles like “Obama Blasts McCain on the Economy.”
Let’s see how McCain fares in the alternate search: “MCCAIN ECONOMY”
Google Results for the search "mccain economy"
Like Obama, McCain is wisely sponsoring this search in the paid listings, so his own website comes up first. The good news for McCain continues in the top organic search results, which also point to his website. However, the remaining results are not quite as sunny. News results include some of the same articles that were listed on Obama’s search page, e.g., “Obama: McCain’s Economic Message Out of Touch.” The videos that are listed are also mixed: one YouTube video underlines the lack of a differences between McCain and Bush in economic policy.
Caution: SEO Rant Coming….
The two sets of results illustrate that searches including a candidate’s name will tend to veer more positively for that candidate. I see this as a missed opportunity for the opposing side to insert its voice into the search results. The best way to capture the search results for the opposing candidate’s name are:
- Paid listings – Why aren’t both campaigns sponsoring the opposing candidate’s name?
- News results – News article titles that combine your name + opposing name + issue are the most effective, for example: “Obama Slams McCain on Economy“
- Optimized YouTube uploads
- Optimized pages on the candidates’ own sites – why aren’t there pages on www.barackobama.com that contain the titles “McCain taxes” or “McCain economy”?
Lastly, I think that the message that speaks through the candidate’s own search listing should be examined. In a search for “mccain taxes” I found this result:
And a similar search on Barack Obama’s site brought up this result:
Both of these are pretty weak results. I’d much rather click on a title like: “How Much Would Barack Obama Lower My Taxes? – Find out here“, and McCain’s should obviously be something more compelling than “McCain Staging Site!”
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