Karen Handel, Republican Candidate for Georgia Governor, unveiled her new website last week and the design made me wonder about its effectiveness in the search engines.  Is this new design going to attract the right visitors? Will she even rank under relevant keywords, or will other sites rank first, giving the user a chance to see competitors sites before hers? 

I’ve asked my longtime business partner, Randy Brown of Web-Magic, to run an analysis on some of the sites of statewide candidates for search engine visibility. This is not an attack on any particular candidate or web designer. We are merely showing you the search engine optimization aspect of online political strategy. Web Designers are a creative. They can build you the best looking hottest websites on the web. But SEO must be a part of the plan.

If you take the analysis back to your designers and consultants and they argue that search engines are irrelevant to political campaigns for any one of thousands of reasons – then your competition will gain on the grassroots level and you may be scratching your heads after election day.