Analyzing the Presidential Candidate’s Website SEO & Traffic Data: Part 1
Every candidate has a website to collect campaign contributions, organize outreach, and inform. Do these web platforms serve their purpose correctly?
After a cursory review of available political web platforms, the technology has certainly been commoditized to give every candidate the opportunity to create a compelling web presence. A great measure of success may then be looking at the traffic these sites are generating through their organic channel.
Organic traffic is important to differentiate from other paid traffic sources because it shows a heightened level of consumer interest in a brand or candidate in this case. Potential voters are showing independent interest and actively taking the time to look up information about a candidate within Google and then proceed to the candidates’s site through search results.
Measuring the Data
It can sometimes be very interesting to measure share of voice; especially when there is unique data to analyze.
Let’s set the parameters of political share of voice as the total interest in every political candidate’s websites. The total interest can be the summation of the total organic traffic from each of the candidate’s websites.
Unfortunately this data is privately held be each candidate. However, there are third party tools like SEMRush that can generated estimated organic traffic figures based on the keyword rankings of a site. Here we see the total sum of visitors to candidates sites peaking this past January at over 2.2 million people per month.
This figure is created by analyzing each keyword rank, the associated monthly volume, and the estimated CTR the site would be obtaining based off of where it sits within Google. It is by no means an exact estimation but a great directional indicator.
Measuring Candidates Share of Voice in 2015
We can then segment this traffic down by each of the candidates sites from where it originates. When you measure a candidate’s traffic against the total traffic you can then calculate the share of voice as seen below.
Candidates like Sanders and Trump are growing their share of voice while others like Clinton are declining. This is an indicator that there are many voters actively taking a particular interest in a candidate, searching for them online, and visiting a candidate’s sites.
One reason for Hilary Clinton’s large presence at the beginning is the fact that her website has been used in previous campaigns and has a lot of legacy SEO traffic compared to Ted Cruz’s site which is being used for the first time in a presidential race.
Sizing up all of these websites
Another dimension to how candidates can generate organic traffic is the structure of the website itself; is it only meant to collect donations or is the primary purpose to inform interested voters with content & relevant information?
One way to determine this situation is by identifying the amount of content indexed within Google. The more pages a website has indexed, the greater the chance for organic traffic generally speaking.
Bernie Sanders is clearly leading the pack in terms of size of site indexed within Google.
This figure must be taken with a grain of salt because there could be duplication issues which are not ideal when it comes to SEO, especially for eCommerce sites.
In the next post there will be continued measurement of the political share of voice as well as further analysis of some of the leading candidates’s sites still in the race.
