As a special interest group or lobbyist, when you hire professionals to fight for key legislation in Congress, using search engine optimization (SEO) can streamline efforts, provide better connections and help you better share information with the public.
Lobbying has been protected under free speech for decades, but you want to make sure that your “free speech” is accessible, controlled by you on any special-interest websites, and that anyone searching for more information finds your official content first.
Since the news and media cover lobbying activities, you don’t want a key phrase dominated by a journalist instead of your own official website (or a website that you approve). Lobbying is a means of asking the government to address grievances, and it’s an activity rich with complicated rules and stiff penalties.
There’s no room for error, and in the Digital Era, it can be easy for special interest moves to be misinterpreted. Using SEO can help you hang onto your power and your public voice, and SEO specialists can work with you to better publicize your intentions, goals and plans.
By nature, a high level of disclosure is required with lobbying — which means a lot of public information is available. You can find out how entities lobby, who’s lobbying, who they’re lobbying for and how much they’re spending — all with a Google search (though not all of this information is always accurate).
SEO can help boost traffic to a special interest’s website, or a website they approve of, to the top of search engine rankings. Special interest and lobbying information is arguably much more important than (for example) searching for the latest Justin Bieber music video, but many of the same SEO strategies are the same for each.
That’s the beauty of SEO: Though it’s an ever-changing set of best practices, it can be applied to any website and any industry.
At the heart of lobbying is the goal of persuading those who can make decisions. The same goes for SEO.
An SEO campaign is designed to persuade search engines to rank your website higher when a relevant keyword is queried. For instance, let’s say someone Googles “Utah example lobbying campaign” and you are Special Interest Group ABC. Your goal? Make sure official Special Interest Group ABC information tops Google’s search results.
That can be challenging, especially if your lobbying efforts have stirred up a lot of media interest.
Google and other search engines might identify several news stories from relevant and powerful outlets such as CNN. If CNN does a better job at SEO than you, such as including quality and authoritative links as well as great web content with highly relevant keywords, Special Interest Group ABC’s website and information might get pushed down the list of search engine results pages (SERPs), or even all the way to page two or three of Google!
Many studies have shown that almost nobody looks beyond page one of search results. Most don’t even look beyond the first handful of results. But do you really have time to lobby for yet another cause, even if it’s SEO? Let the experts at Be Locally SEO handle your SEO campaign, while you enjoy the confidence of knowing you (and your efforts) are in great hands.
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