What Time Is The State Of The Union? White House Uses SEO To Spread The Word

President Barack Obama will deliver his 2015 State of the Union at 6pm PT tonight. If you didn’t know the time, you might turn to Google or Bing for an answer. And there, the White House hopes to inform you through a special post it made to rank for that query. Right now, the State […]

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President Barack Obama will deliver his 2015 State of the Union at 6pm PT tonight. If you didn’t know the time, you might turn to Google or Bing for an answer. And there, the White House hopes to inform you through a special post it made to rank for that query.

Right now, the State of the Union is a popular search topic in the United States, as reflected on Google Trends:

Google_Trends_-_Trending_Searches

Many of those State of the Union searches involve people just wanting to know the time, as reflected by the related searches that appear at the end of a main State of the Union search results page:

state of the union google related

It’s a similar phenomenon seen with other live events, such as with the Super Bowl. In fact, it’s so common for the Super Bowl that both Google and Bing will provide a direct answer with the time at the top of their results, like this at Google:

what_time_is_the_super_bowl_-_Google_Search

Google’s finally getting the Super Bowl start time right, by the way. Last week, Google was listing information about last year’s Super Bowl game.

But for the State of the Union, neither Google nor Bing are showing direct answers. You just get a list of web results, as this example from Bing shows:

bing state of the union

A direct answer is much nicer. Without it, of course, it does mean various web sites can try to grab a share of the search clicks. It’s a common-enough occurrence for every Super Bowl, as we’ve covered before.

This year, the White House itself has worked to make sure it’s one of the web sites providing an answer. Consider Google’s results below:

google state of the union

You can see that today, the White House made a special post called What Time Is The State of the Union?, as shown below:

white house what time is the state of the union

That’s a pure SEO play — and a smart one. The White House understands people are going to want to know this answer, and it has created content designed to answer it and more.

And how can you watch? The White House has another post entirely devoted to that — so check it out: Watching The State of the Union: Everything You Need To Know.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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