On the 20th June, if you typed in the term ‘boris bus’ into Google, you would have been supplied with news stories, tweets and articles on Boris Johnson’s Routemaster buses. If you look at the first list of URLS below, you’ll see four of the six ranking articles for this key term are unsavoury articles about the failure of his buses.
Now take a look above at the second set of URLS and see what you get today. Three top stories with his name and the phrase ‘model buses’, three Tweets mentioning ‘model buses’ and his name, and then four organic search results, two of which are about him and ‘model buses’. This is only one day in too – remember, search is a long game, not a short game.
If you look at Google clickthrough stats, the top three positions have CTRs from nearly 30% in first position to 10% in third position. In the lower positions of 9 to 10, CTR has fallen to a sub 2%, according to
Smart Insights. Mentions from so many high tier publications with hefty domain authorities are pushing down ‘Routemaster bus’ related articles and replacing them with articles about Boris making… model buses.
Not only has Boris used his infamous ‘dead cat strategy’ to move the conversation away from him and Carrie Symonds and his plans for Brexit, he’s managed to push down his past mistakes on Google, too – making it more difficult for people to get a quick snapshot of relevant information. He’s not just controlling the narrative here – he’s practically rewriting it. And judged by the standards of an SEO campaign, it’s hard to describe it as anything other than a resounding success.