John Raymond

Everyone has commercials they love and hate.  A series of commercials that drove me nuts were the ones for Progressive’s Flo.  It felt like they were on all the time.   In June of last year,  I decided to do some keyword research on Progressive’s spokesperson.  I discovered that there were very high monthly keyword volumes for the phrases “Progressive Flo” and “Progressives Flo.”

After further research I discovered that despite investing time and money into the commercials for Flo, Progressive was not at the top of the Search Engines for those terms.  Neither Progressive’s web site nor the youtube videos were optimized for the most popular terms.  I thought this was odd considering that the natural step for me was to google Flo and find out more about her.  What was even more surprising was that www.progressivesflo.com was available.

As a little SEO experiment, I decided to buy the domain name and set up “the unofficial fan site” of Flo.  What was I going to write about?  I went to the Progressive youtube channel and wrote a blog post about each of the commercials.  I made sure to optimize the posts for search engines.  Since launching in July of 2009, the site has gotten over 4,000 visits and 7,500 page views.  In the last thirty days it’s received over 800 visits.  I haven’t promoted it beyond tweeting it (at launch).

That’s about 500 potential leads a month that are hitting my site all because of search engine optimization.  The next time you plan a marketing campaign you may want to think about how people will search for your campaign on the web.   Will they google the slogan, the character’s name, the celebrity you have starring in the commercial?  These are all opportunities to get visits to your web site.

Recently, Progressive has done a better job in ranking for the high volume terms related to Flo.  They now have two listings on the front page for “Progressive Flo.”   However, with the SEO value of their web site, they could easily dominate the google rankings for these terms if they optimized their web site and social media campaigns for them.

I’ve been doing a lot of pro bono work on brueninglass.com. My uncle, Marc Konys has had a lot of success getting business from his web site through search engine marketing. I brought my laptop over to his shop to shoot a short video. I edited it using iMovie and have posted it to YouTube and on his site. You can see that I’m trying to optimize the video for certain keywords in the title, description, and tags. For organizations and individuals, producing videos for youtube can help you quickly get to the top of google. Why? Well YouTube is one of the most linked to sites on the internet and google will rank content on it higher because it is such a popular site. Experiment and see where you wind up in the search engines.

Here’s the video:

How do I get to the top of google? It’s a hard question to answer. Before I got into doing search engine optimization, I did not realize how important it was. And as I’ve learned search engine optimization, I’ve come to realize that it’s really a science. I like to refer to getting your site on the front page of google as a stew. There are a whole lot of different elements to getting to the top. Here are a few basic things you can do to start the process:

1. A great starting point is to install Google Analytics on your website. This will show you the state of your website. You can see who is coming to your site and how they are getting there.
2. Look to see if your pages contain meta-tags – title, meta-tags and meta-descriptions. Some people discount the value of these things but they are important.
3. Evaluate the structure and setup of your website. If the majority of your website is in flash , google is not able to index it properly or a well as if it were all in html.
4. Brainstorm over what words you think people are trying to find your site with or that you would want to find your site with.

These few pointers are good starting steps towards getting to the top of google. Remember that search engine optimization is about bringing more traffic (ideally targeted traffic) toward your website from google.

This is a topic I’m passionate about. If you have any questions about the process, please contact me..

Designing a web site for a attorney or law office can be a challenge. David Chernosky approached me in the Winter of 2008 and challenged me to create a Web site for him. David is a Lemon Attorney in Ohio and wanted start an interactive web site to generate online case leads. After evaluating several top lemon lawyer websites, I proposed this design which included several elements geared toward generating leads. The site was launched in late January of 2008 and I continue to do periodic maintenance and SEO work on the web site.

This website design job involved design, html coding, and search engine optimization. The site, Waterford Crystal Repair, was designed for Marc Konys. The are one of a handful of companies endorsed by Waterford. I constructed, designed and implemented this website in the fall of 2008. Marc has raved about the ability to update and add content to the site on his own.

On my advice, he purchased this highly targeted domain name and it has paid off with a high conversion rate. The site is now on the first page of google for the phrase “waterford crystal repair”

Mark Konys, the owner of Bruening Glass Works, wanted to increase traffic to his website, be able to update his website through a content management system, and improve his search engine ranking. I recently relaunched the site with several tools that will help meet his goals.

Bruening Glass Works Website Redesign will help Mark improve his SEO.

Among the things I’ve added/changed, is a “recent project” blog which will help improve SEO. By restructuring the site in this format, Mark is already getting more responses via his contact form and his traffic and page views are up.

Visit Bruening Glass Works

I can help increase your traffic by optimizing your site for search engines. Shoot me and email or give me a call to find out how.