Posted on Jan 31.07 to politics, Testing, political marketing, SEO, New Media, Online Marketing, Search, Publishing |   

I’ve written before about online political marketing and research, but now I’d like to do a little experimention.
Obviously, the first place to look is search, how competative is this niche exactly? 2007 is an election year for Boston’s City Council members, essentially a smaller race in an “off” political year. Everyone’s looking to 2008. First I’ll start with a blog post, nothing tricky or even very aggressive; best not to bring a gun to a knife fight. My question is this:
Can I rank well for a high level (relative to the niche) search term like Boston City Council with a simple post on an obliquely related site?
I say obliquely because this blog is not really about politics or even Boston, but as I live in one and am interested in the other, I do mention them from time to time. I might even mention this specific topic more in the future.
My initial research with wordtracker into the keywords has revealed low volume at this point in the year:

• boston city council 3

Keyworddiscovery’s longer sample revealed more keywords, but still low numbers:

• boston city council 374
• politics city council boston 11
• stephen murphy boston city council 9
• matt o malley boston city council 8
• boston city council at large candidates 7
• city council members boston ma 7
• boston, massachusetts city council social policy 7
• joe ready boston city council 6
• john connolly boston city council 6
• connolly for boston city council 4

The traffic over history graph doesn’t show any seasonal trends, since last year was not a city council election year.
Now, I’m a little worried about over repetition of the keyword, but we’ll see what happens, the content was organically created.