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.