Why the Centre Party succeeded in the 2018 election

The Centre Party achieved its best election result in 30 years during the 2018 parliamentary election. A result that was very surprising – but not entirely unexpected. The Centre Party had launched a brand-new website and a new strategy for how their political content would reach voters with the support of Google Ads and search engine optimization.

– We launched a major web project where the external website would be integrated with our intranet. We developed a completely new digital strategy that made it possible to build a foundation for keyword advertising for our political content. The Centre Party’s goal was to drive more relevant traffic to Centerpartiet.se and increase conversions. We worked to get more people to engage with the party by becoming members and signing up for our newsletter. In addition, we carried out a number of digital campaigns around relevant and pressing issues, says Ola Spännar, former Head of Communications at the Centre Party.

Seeing results from SEO and SEM investments is something every responsible client expects. To succeed in achieving good results, a company needs to carefully map out its own website and what it wants to accomplish with its investment. The Centre Party was determined to achieve a better result than in the previous election period.

– We began by carefully reviewing the reports from the previous election year. We knew we had a somewhat smaller budget for 2018 – but with the ambition to achieve better results. There were a few success factors, I would say: hiring Brath, who are SEO/SEM specialists; creating a search-optimized website structure; and having ongoing follow-ups to ensure the quality of our efforts.

Thanks to keyword advertising, traffic to the Centre Party’s website doubled despite a lower budget, compared to the investment in Google Adwords during the 2014 election year.

Ola’s three best tips:

1) Clarity is everything. With a vague brief, it’s difficult to deliver good results. The clearer the goals and purpose, the clearer the outcome. You need to take a close look at how searches appear in your segment today, how the business is driven, what revenues look like, which business areas exist, and which should be further developed.
2) A certain degree of knowledge about web content and an understanding of your business, and how business and communication goals are organized. You should only do search advertising if you have a website built for it; otherwise, the investment is meaningless.
3) The person responsible for ordering must either have decision-making authority or direct access to the decision-maker. This is not something you do once a year; therefore, there must be a degree of flexibility within the organization.

More on SEO and SEM in politics

We have previously written about SEO in elections. For example, read Search engines decisive in the election, about a study showing that 20% of undecided voters are influenced by search results, or about how a political party can think about search terms.