SEObama vs. HTMillary
Well, it looks like the Democratic primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is neck and neck. Hillary started out strong, but Obama has been gaining momentum and has just overtaken Hillary in the race for the nomination. Obviously, the Democrats in this country are torn between the two candidates, so this post should help those in Internet Marketing circles decide on the best candidate by judging the strength of their online campaign efforts.
Nickycakes has compiled ten areas for judging the strength of both Obama and Hillary’s websites and campaigns. Here goes:
- Inbound Links
In judging online popularity of a website, nothing says it better than the number of inbound links your website has. According to Yahoo Site Explorer, BarackObama.com has 1,240,000 inbound links while HillaryClinton.com has 636,000 inbound links. Obama totally schools her with almost twice the inbound links.
- Indexed Pages
This one was pretty surprising. A google site: search showed that BarackObama.com has 451,000 indexed pages while HillaryClinton.com has 49,000 indexed pages. Talk about pwned. - Title Tag SEO
Neither Obama’s or Hillary’s websites keyword stuff the title tag or anything. Both are fairly well done and do farily well in describing the site. Both get a win for this one.
- Meta Tags
Barack Obama’s site wins again on this one. Barack’s site has complete meta tags with comma delineated keywords, descriptions, copyright, and instructions for search engine bots, while Hillary’s only has the description and a few keywords, almost identical to the title. - Alexa Traffic Rank
Another win for Barack Obama. The current traffic rank for BarackObama.com is 5643 whereas the rank for HillaryClinton.com is 18364.
- Google Pagerank
With the huge lead BarackObama.com has in inbound links, these results are not surprising. Both domains are PR6. - Domain Age
Looks like Clinton has got this one in the bag. HillaryClinton.com has been around for 9 years 2 months. BarackObama.com has only been registered for 3 years 9 months.
- Viral Marketing
Clinton certainly got a very early lead on this one. Nickycakes can remember several years ago getting spammed by myspace group invites for a Hillary 08 group. This was back when viral marketing wasn’t really even a retardedly overused stupid buzzword like it is now (who else is tired of digital point morons talking about GOING VIRAL!!!@#$!!111). Anyway, the top most viewed Youtube video when searching for Hillary Clinton is actually a really cool Obama video modeled after a Mac commercial back in the day called Vote Different with about 4.5 million views. He’s also got that video with the Black Eyed Peas guy called Yes We Can which is actually posted twice on Youtube with about 7million combined views. The majority of the Hillary videos with any significant number of views are videos of her getting pissed about stuff, so that’s not exactly working her favor. Clear win for Barack. - Landing Page Quality
So, Obama’s webpage overall is a lot cooler than Hillary’s in terms of usability and overall looking cool, we’re just judging the landing page right now. They both do this a little differently. On Barack’s site, first time visitors are shown a landing page with a clear “call to action” email submit style in the middle of the page for signing up for the email list. Return visitors are sent right to the main page without the email submit form, leaving room for good content. Hillary’s front page has the “call to action”, same style, above the fold, middle of the page, and there it stays for return visits. Both do well for following good marketing practices for getting people to subscribe, so both are winners for this one. - Money Spent on Internet Media
This part is huge. When you run for president, you certainly want some google ads to show up for your campaign when users search for politics related stuff. You want to put banners on related websites, etc. You want people properly running your website, handling campaign media, managing your mailing lists, etc. All that takes money. Opensecrets.org lists campaign spending for all the candidates, so it’s easy to see who has spent more. Obama has cranked out $1.7million on internet media while Hillary has spent only $1.3mil.
Well, that’s pretty much it. It is worth noting that the demographic of Hillary Clinton’s supporters are generally older and more blue collar compared to Barack’s, so it would make sense that her website and web campaign would not be getting as much support. However, this is all the more reason for her to spend more on web marketing and make every opportunity available for her to get the support of the young voters.
Anyway, if you’re involved with internet marketing in any capacity, then the above 10 things are the issues that matter the most to you, and should give you an idea of who to support if you haven’t decided yet. Here is the final tally:
Nice comparison, I did a similar spreadsheet with all the candidates last year when they first announced their candidacy, even then, Obama will well ahead of the rest of the pack. If the elections were online, Barack would win hands down.
wtf – what about RP? He was built on the internet!
But what about Ron Paul?!?!?!?!
You’re off on the keywords, I’m afraid. I ran ads on Super Tuesday that got 50K impressions and they weren’t advertising on almost all of the keywords. Likewise, their sites aren’t useful nor ranking in that regard.
OK, I didn’t phrase that properly. Made it sound like mine was the final word there. I was just trying to say that I’ve got pretty good data contradicting yours.
Lol I didn’t read it all but it was funny to see comparison in online links inbound and ratings on that lol, funny stuff.
“Neither Obama’s or Hillary’s websites keyword stuff the title tag or anything”
Um, I thought this would make them both loosers then.
Unique, Nicky. + rep.
It’s also worth noting that Obama is a new deal while Clinton has been around for decades so it would make sense that there would be more web buzz with Obama. That and what you already said about the older blue collar crowd.
It would be damn interesting to investigate this further to determine whether Obama’s numerical supremacy is a leading indicator. If you assumed that Alexa graph was predictive you could have scored some major cash back before Iowa.
A cool project would be to collect these stats for statewide races, even local ones. And then match them up against market-based indicators, like Tradesports. Predictive? Coincidental? Lagging?
The thing about Clinton’s support ranging to the older set is certainly true, but they have the bulk of our economy’s disposable income too. They are more wired than you give them credit for.
Awesome post.
Alexa? WTF? You can’t afford Hitwise or some other useful traffic ranking system?
(jk – really cool article)