The political world and the SEO world are not intuitively a match, but they keep bumping into each other. The results are often very amusing: from George W. Bush’s “miserable failure” Google bomb to Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, having to explain to congress why you see an image of Donald Trump when you search for “idiot.” The latest politician to grace the SEO world was Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister.
Johnson is known for being unconventional, but some of his current declarations have left analysts puzzled. One of the theories for them paints him as an SEO evil genius trying to manipulate search results pages.
The improbable SEO master
Last June, Johnson gave a declaration about painting old wine boxes into buses as a hobby. One month later, he defended that EU rules were damaging the trade of kippers in the fishing industry. He has also made a point of talking to the police, and he has declared himself as a “model of restraint.”
The reasoning behind these random facts? According to the theory, Johnson is using the press coverage that comes from the bizarre declarations to manipulate Google results.
The use of the bus keyword is related to the fact that his redesigned London Routemaster buses have been seeing a lot of complaints from the public. The focus on kipper was meant to hide his connections with the UKIP, the polemic UK Independence Party, whose supporters are called kippers. The lecture to the police was a way to compete with news about the police being called into his house for domestic disturbance. The “model of restraint” should outrank results about his alleged affair with former model Jennifer Arcuri.
SEO and Storytelling
It is hard to tell if Johnson (or any of his assistants) is a mastermind of SEO or if this is all a series of coincidences seen through a search marketing lens. However, the examples that support this theory show how storytelling can play a role in your SEO strategy. Quality content is one of the main factors for SEO ranking. While it may seem contradictory to focus on storytelling when your final goal is specific keywords, you need to keep in mind that you are writing for humans, not for Google’s robots.
Storytelling makes your content more engaging to read and more relevant to your audience. Keep your content fresh, unexpected, and interesting around your most important keywords. We have no way of knowing what Boris Johnson’s political future will be — but his administration has already given us a lesson in Search Marketing.
