US Elections Entity Showdown

For those living in the United States of America (yours truly included), we've had an "interesting" political year, with the rest yet to come!

In November, the American people will vote for a new President. The current choices of the main political parties are Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Yes. For those outside of the US, this is apparently the best option we (as American voters) have.

Although politics are divisive, facts (illogically) are open to interpretation, and political polarization is rampant in today's supercharged environment, I decided to look at the two main candidates' websites to see if their topical coverage matches their talking points and the nation's political interests (based on search volume).

None of this will likely affect the outcome of this year's elections, and I'm hopeful that both candidates' digital marketing teams are busy making updates - I found some obvious SEO issues with both candidates' sites (Kamala here, here, and Donald here) - to improve their web presence and visibility around the non-brand terms that the American public wants to know about, whether that's hot-button topics like immigration, taxes, abortion, and Medicare, or more Constitutional topics like freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, or voting rights themselves.

Showing up in search results and being found for the?right?search queries isn't just about "politics are usual"; it's about ensuring you have content that both matches and satisfies user intent.

Methodology

I created a project for each candidate's website in inLinks , analyzing the recommended number of pages—or 200 maximum if more than 200 pages were recommended—and then looked at the topics (entities) discovered, filtering on "politics" as the primary topic category.

InLinks has a great topic wheel it builds from the entities found. The two websites are visualized below.

Note: KamalaHarris.com only features 105 pages, while DonaldJTrump.com features 197.

This is due to the KamalaHarris.com site being pretty light on actual content pages (and not having a functioning XML sitemap), with many pages being part of their store. KamalaHarris.com is built on WordPress. I added all I could find via the InLinks crawl.

DonaldJTrump.com features many more content pages (477 in its XML sitemap) and is built on the ExpressionEngine CMS platform. Most of its pages are news articles. I added the maximum number (200) of pages to the project; in this case, 197 were imported.

Kamala's Topic Wheel

InLinks provides a filter for the main categories to simplify and exclude the less relevant (and to provide a level playing field); I selected just the topics that the system recognized as being "political" (the most important are in the 'political' branch of the topic map).

The table contains a few columns that I'll highlight for both SEO and opportunity.

The search volume is the monthly search volume for the search topic.

The frequency is a system-calculated metric that shows in a percentage the relative usage of that entity.

Titles identify whether the topic/entity is used in a page title (say what you will; title tags are still used to explain a page's content and have both ranking correlation studies and a Google spokesperson's comment to support them!)

The SEU (Search Engine Understanding) column scores out of 100 based on whether the entities are recognized by Google's Natural Language Processing (NLP). Values between 1 and 99 indicate an entity may be less complete (i.e. a synonym or abbreviation) than an exact match to the Google NLP record.

So, what does the Kamala topic table show us?

Her campaign website focuses on only a few key political and societal issues.

It's easy to see that the site's content lacks depth. This results in very few entities being recognized, even less by search engines, and a loss in the site's broader potential to connect with more (relevant) search queries.

Given the campaign's messaging of "freedom," "democracy," and "country," it's no surprise that those entities show up in the Harris website's content, but none have the frequency of usage to definitively position the website as a resource for Americans looking for information on those topics (note that the?Democratic Party website?does have more information about their platform but not about the campaign messaging).

Caveats: I am supporting neither the website nor the candidate with the results of this quick study; rather, I want to highlight opportunities for?both?sites to improve. I already identified some core SEO issues, but I believe that either party following "Entity SEO" better practices could improve their search visibility for non-brand terms, improve the likelihood of them appearing for the answers to questions the American voting public has, and help inspire, inform, and educate; key tenets of any democratic process.

Donald's Topic Wheel

According to the InLinks site crawl, the first and most notable difference is the number of topics covered on the?DonaldJTrump.com?website.

Part of this is just having more pages to analyze, likely due to the time frame that Trump's site has been around and focused on consistent issues (posts since September 2023). It might also be due to the 'newness' of Kamala's presidential run. Either way, this is a snapshot of both sites' current content as of August 12th. It is purely a comparison of today's site content.

In that comparison, we can see far more 'branches' of topics and far more topics recognized by Google's NLP.

I doubt this is because (putting words in Donald Trump's mouth, "This is the greatest site ever created." Rather, it's an outcome of covering?many?topics over the past 11 months - with almost 1,000 news posts published.

Taking a look at Donald's Topic Table

First, the table above for Kamala shows?all?the political topics found by InLinks. The list of political topics on?DonaldJTrump.com?is too long to display, so I've linked both lists here, together with their topic wheels.

That complete list (and wheel) shows less entity coverage over a broader range of topics.

I filtered the full list below to omit people and places, and you can see how the site - through its news posts - covers both pro and con platform issues and discussion points to help the site rank for broader informational queries. (Note that the frequency of the entity inclusions likely affects the site's ability to rank well for some of these queries.)

This broader coverage allows the site to rank for more non-brand queries (even if those rankings are not relevant and low, e.g., "Is it illegal to bribe a teacher?") and rank well (#1) for "presidential campaign websites."

The 2024 (Entity) Election Results

We're still a few months away from an election in which anything may happen! The main thing we can deduce from the two primary candidates' websites is that Donald Trump's site outperforms (in entity coverage and search engine understanding) Kamala Harris's due to a dearth of content coverage and authoring on the latter's site.

Whether this is intentional - preferring the Presidential run to be more focused on the Democratic party's platform - or whether the Harris site is set to be just a fund-raising and shopping experience, it's key to any site where informational queries should land to address and satisfy those informational questions.

In this realm, Trump's consistent publishing of articles and news helps elevate his entity coverage, search engine understanding, and traffic.

Time for our politicians and their marketing teams to step up in the entity game!

My name is Grant Simmons, and I approve this message!