UK Labour Needs To Use More Search Engine Optimisation Skills

Newspapers are losing sales and TV channels are losing credibility (not fast enough though, it has to be said).
So where do most voters turn to now when they want to find out about a political party?

They go online.

They may go to Facebook and Twitter, maybe Instagram too. But many do not.
They simply put a search term into Google (or occasionally Bing) and look at the results that turn up.

But the Labour Party is missing out in the search engines.

When I search Google for ‘Labour Policies‘, I get the Labour Party ‘Where we stand’, followed by ‘Manifesto’.
That’s good.
But, underneath those and still, on the Google front page, I then find:

• “Investors fear Labour policies ahead of the election” – Financial times
• “What Labour and Conservative policies really mean for immigration” – The Times
• “What Jeremy Corbyn’s tax plan means for you and what you’ll pay” – The Telegraph

And you can imagine the anti-Labour spin in those above three articles alone…

Next I get the Google ‘question box’ with:
“What does the Labour party believe in?”
And a link going to a Wikipedia article by the Australian Labor Party!
Give me strength! 🙄

Google Page 2:

• “Labour Party latest news, pictures, policies and campaigns …” – The Daily Express…
• “What is Labour’s Brexit plan?” – BBC News asks its usual question even though it knows the answer full well.

Okay, then there’s an article from the Guardian (?) and one from Labour List.
We also get: “Labour for a Green New Deal—Policy” – but the page hasn’t been updated since conference…

And that’s it for anything really positive about Labour Policy and those links are between other non-positive links. And we are at the end of the 2nd page.

Most people don’t search any further than that…

Now at this point, some may say “well what can you expect – search engines are biased”.

And I would say, Wake up!

Search engines are biased towards making money. That means selling advertising spots.
They are not going to be able to do that if their searches are seen to be skewed. Because if that is the case, people won’t use them and advertisers will go elsewhere.

(I’m not saying that there are no problems with the large search engines – there obviously are. But that would take a whole other article and we need to put that aside and get some positive posts on Labour UK up the top of the search engines now!).

Now, I’m old school SEO (search engine optimisation). I learned SEO in the late 90s and carried on learning and using it in the noughties.

I know how to get a post to the top of the search engines using keywords, links and trusted sites.

But I haven’t the up-to-date knowledge, the time (and certainly not the money) to learn how to counter bot impressions on such a large scale as employed by some political parties.

I also do not have access to making headway on ‘trusted sites’ in the political category – Large print newspapers, well-known magazines, etc.

But I’m sure that there must be a whole load of talented people in the Labour Party who could work on this.

So this is a plea:

PLEASE, to help UK Labour:

If you haven’t got one already, set up a blog (wordpress.com would be a good start, or blogger, or open a free Medium account)

• Start writing positive articles on UK Labour using great keywords and keep on doing so.
• Share all your positive posts all over social media.
• Share links with other UK Labour writers and share their posts too.
• Comment on any Labour positive post.
• Share articles from Labour-positive Newspapers and write about them too.

This is not about brilliant writing – SEO isn’t about that (sadly).
It’s just about getting good, hopeful, positive, voteable articles about UK Labour all over the front pages of the search engines.

And here’s another plea:

If you are up-to-date on SEO and have the resources to help.
Please get in touch with Labour or Momentum and offer your services.

This is from me. I’m in no way speaking for UK Labour or Momentum, but I’m pretty sure they’d appreciate the offer.

Labour is Missing Out in the Search Engines. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
So please do what you can to change this quickly!

PS:
The Image used at the beginning of this post is from:
How many of these Labour Party policies did you actually hear about this summer?

Things are even worse now in the run up to the 12th December 2019 General Election.

The article, by Another Angry Voice, is correct and excellent, but I’m sure that the writer would prefer not to have to write a similar one after December this year.