No this is not a blog post about her recent endorsement of Barack Obama for President. Rather it is a post to highlight the power of coverage in the media on a topic by a celebrity of the status of Oprah Winfrey. In mid-October Oprah discussed the topic of super foods on her show. Flax seed has often been included as a super food and its mention on the Oprah Show in mid October caused the total number of people searching for flax seed and flax seed related information to go up by 2-3 fold. Keep in mind that this was a transient phenomenon that was completely independent of any changes in the SERPs for our particular client.

Over the period of August 1st until now the direct traffic and non-search engine traffic was pretty much stable. However the search engine generated traffic to our client’s site doubled and even tripled during about a two week period in October. The keyword phrases of “flax seed benefits” had a huge increase in searches throughout the month of October and also November. Those particular searches have decreased significantly almost back to the level seen in August. At first we thought maybe of client had lost ground on some of his high rankings in the search engines but after more analysis we cannot see any evidence for this. He is still #2 on both Google and Yahoo for this keyword.

#2 – flax seed benefits – Google
#2 – flax seed benefits – Yahoo

So it really seems that it was purely a function of public awareness and that the transient increase in the number of people searching for information on flax seeds was generated from the buzz from the Oprah Winfrey show. Of course we had helped position our client to be one of the first companies seen after people searched for flax related information and fully take advantage of the “Oprah Effect” when it happened.

Eric SEO and SEM