Government campaign to act on CO2 relies on SEO
The government is currently running an environmental campaign to encourage people and businesses to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions.
While the press adverts give you a URL to visit for more information, the TV adverts don't give you a website address, instead encouraging you to “search for ‘act on co2'”.
This is an unusual tactic, as it relies on the campaign's website being ranked top (or very highly) across major search engines. The logic is presumably that rather than feeling as if you are being directed towards a public information campaign, the user will feel as if they are discovering for themselves, and being presented with impartial views of the search engine (Google presumably has a higher trust rating than the UK government).
What is interesting is that it also open to the possibility that others may piggyback onto this search term in order to spread their message to a wider audience.
Indeed, if you search for the term on Google, you get a number of sponsored links for companies offering carbon offset mortgages, eco-friendly car insurance (surely an oxymoron?!) and carbon offsetting companies.
Even more interestingly, the third result is the “Association of British Drivers” with a page debunking climate change from CO2 under the heading “The government is lying to you”. This is even higher ranked on MSN, along with a website set up specifically to counter the ads. This is a real example of how people-power can now ride on the back of an official government campaign (and it's also fairly unforgivable that the agency running the campaign didn't register the .co.uk domain).
I'm guessing that the agency that created the campaign deliberately chose “act on CO2″ as a phrase that wasn't being targeted by many sites at the time, and would be easy to get to the top of the rankings for. The Department for Transport has also taken out paid adverts on Google and Yahoo for the search terms, which I presume is so they can gather statistics on how many people are searching for the term, versus how many click on their link.
They have also bought adverts on “act on C02″ (zero two, rather than oh-two) for concerned members of the public with less scientific backgrounds!
It will be interesting to see whether this article will ever start to show up in the
results for the search term.
