It’s All In A Website: Why Political Parties Are Missing The Greatest Trick Of All
How (and more importantly why)) are the UK's leading political parties failing to develop a strong online presence?
If you were going to launch a business, what is the first thing you would invest in?
If you are anything like me, you would head online and procure a new domain on which you can build a functional website. You would then look to optimise this, paying careful attention to Google’s regular rolling updates and the impact that they have on the boundaries of SEO.
Interestingly, this is not a priority of the major political parties in the UK, whose websites seem to serve as little more than a token online presence. Rather than being a source of debate, inspiration and key policy data, these websites are error-strewn and poorly finished entities that do little for the image of any party.
The Key Political Parties and their websites
Surprisingly, the best performing political website belongs to the Scottish National Party (SNP). This site has a loading time of 3.4 seconds (which is better that Internet users expectations), and minimal down-time of just 1.2%. This is the exception to the rule when it comes to political parties in the UK, however, with the other major parties falling badly behind these standards. For example: -
1. The Conservative Party
While the Tories may have won the recent election by a landslide, this had little to do with their website. The site has a number of basic optimisation errors, while many of its highest search engine rankings are recorded in relation to irrelevant keyword phrases. The pages included on the website also took an average of seven seconds to load, which is far in excess of user expectations.
Despite this, there is some reason for optimism in the Tory camp, as their website does rank highly for political soundbites and resources that offer advice on how to become an MP in the modern age. Rather like the party themselves, the Conservative website flourishes in a vacuum created by the inadequacies of others.
2. The Labour Party
Let's start with the good news for Labour, who managed to record the second-best load time of 6.4 seconds. In almost every other way, however, Labour’s website is a complete and unmitigated disaster. Having failed for a quarter of users who tried to access the site, however, there are clearly structural issues that require urgent attention.
On the back of a failed site migration in 2014, Labour is also suffering from poor SEO heritage and a significant lack of external links. This remains the lifeblood of SEO in 2015, as without a linking profile it is impossible to establish any viable presence on the Internet. This may be a good thing at present, at least until the site's fundamental issues can be sorted.
3 The UK Independence Party (UKIP)
After a disappointing election that saw the party win just a single seat, UKIP may need to reinvent itself in time for the 2020 election. It may want to start by revisiting its website, which took nine seconds to load on average when it was previously tested. This is an age in 2015, while the party’s digital woes did not stop with a slow and cumbersome performance.
There are also deep strategic flaws, however, which have left the website ranking highly for entirely random and comical keywords. The site beats John Lewis and House of Fraser for the keywords ‘gold silk tie’, for example, but yet fails to appear until page seven in relation to key policy issues such as immigration (which happened to be the cornerstone of the party’s campaign). The tragedy of this is that UKIP have at least paid attention to the core basics of SEO, featuring Open Graph Meta, well optimised page titles and a mobile website among their pages.
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