Full disclosure: I love Bernie Sanders. I think he’s a smart, principled guy. He was also the subject of my favorite SNL skit this year; he even does his own impressions!
While Bernie Sanders hasn’t personally taught me anything about SEO, a website promoting his presidential candidacy can teach us a good lesson about how businesses can think about SEO as we move into 2016 (and beyond).
It was actually through the process of researching how I (as an independent voter) could potentially vote for Bernie that I decided to create this article. I live in Massachusetts, so I Googled “register to vote democratic primary ma” — and was surprised by the result:
A “Vote for Bernie” microsite (his main campaign site is BernieSanders.com) was outranking the state of Massachusetts’s official pages on the topic.
I wondered if this was consistent with other areas of the country. To get a cleaner look at those SERPs, I fired up the Google AdWords ad preview tool.
I find this to be a really handy tool for things like diagnosing AdWords issues for specific terms in specific areas, helping clients understand how they’re being seen by searchers in a specific area, and even (as in this case) taking a quick look at an organic search result in another area.
In this case, I wanted to see what searchers would see if they ran the same query I had from within a few different states. Here’s what I found.
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