White House Uses SEO To Sell Health Care Bill

Not even the White House can ignore the power of the Google. TechPresident picked up on this subtle use of phrasing by the White House blog to optimize the SEO of their posts … in this instance, how to cause them show up higher on Google search results.

Which was something the White House was extra interested in last week when the Internet was afire with health care reform:

On Tuesday afternoon, just after President Obama signed the health care bill into law, Google searches rocketed upwards for the phrase “What’s in the Health Care Bill?,” as we noted at the time. There was, the data showed, a hunger in the United States for information on what the legislation would actually mean for the country.

At the time, the top-rated Google search results for that phrase were news reports, and third-party analysis of the bill — not all of it admiring of the legislation. In fact, much of it was quite negative towards the health care reform legislation.

And so, the White House swooped into action. At about 4:30 in the afternoon, a post went up on the White House blog titled the exact same phrase as that top Google search term — “What’s in the Health Care Bill?”

This is nothing new: This is what websites spend a whole lot of time and energy figuring out how best to do and there are a LOT of tricks to it. But it’s interesting to see the White House’s Internet savvy at work in such a measurable way.

(This post originally appeared at Mediaite)