The insurance provider Nationwide® started a new ad campaign with its pitch putting focus on finding and using "The World’s Greatest Spokesperson" and allows people to follow the progression at WorldsGreatestSpokesperson.com .

I like seeing any company use an exact match domain to it’s campaign no matter of "length" of the domain. It is better to make sense with the domain name then to confuse people. Confusing your viewers will result into not easily allowing the viewers to find the site that is used to continue your message online.

One thing that I noticed, Spokesperson is kind of a weird word. It for sure can turn into a word that people will have a harder time to spell.

With that being said, Nationwide uses domain forwarding with WorldsGreatestSpokesperson.com and forwards it to a Sub-Domain directly on it’s Nationwide.com domain. Many will not or do not notice the change in the browser window, but the domain name does change to worldsgreatestspokesperson.nationwide.com . worldsgreatestspokesperson is the sub-domain.

Most companies use a 301 redirect forwarding the domain used in the ad to it’s main site, but the biggest problem I see with this, are the negative effects it has on search ending rank placements for the specific campaign. The "keywords" used for the specific campaign become keywords that people on the net "search for". This is one of the important reasons to owning the exact match domain name. Using a domain forward does not allow the domain owner to have a "SERP" for the matching domain used in the ad due to the forward in search engines. If the domain is on a stand alone site, it does.

Since the domain name is used as a forward and not as a stand alone website (in this case), there needs to be an effort by the owners to focus on using keywords and the meta description needs to be focused as well.

Using the sub-domain is much better for search engine placement for the specific page on Nationwide.com and WILL help those searching find and SE’s to display it because of the exact match term used AS the sub-domain. This will help them rank better in search engines. SE’s scan from left to right when looking at a domain! The problem currently, they rank # 7 on Google for the search term Worlds Greatest Spokesperson. That is NOT good for them.

Really, you would be amazed at the amount of different searches that searcher’s use and each one can and often DOES return a different result at the top!  Capital letters make a difference, spaces, no space, apostrophe, no apostrophe, plural, singular and much more! Search engines see a period, comma, hyphen etc. as a "space", so keep that in mind.

Nationwide does pretty good with the meta description for the specific page for the ad that searches see using a search engine, telling people what they will find when clicking in and inviting people to click, but could of used keywords a little better in meta. All these little things make a difference. The title used is pretty good as well but doesn’t make a ton of sense, "The World’s Greatest Spokesperson in the World". I think they covered the "world’s" part in the start and do not need World again at the end!

World’s Greatest Spokesperson ~ Official Nationwide Site : is what I would use for the page title.

Nationwide Worlds Greatest Spokesperson

I think one thing that is hurting them for ranking better in SE’s, is the web page is mainly Flash. Since "flash" is mainly "graphics", they are not using the vital Keywords in text form on the site that search engines crawl and look for.

A lot of money is being spent on this ad campaign, so you have to keep in mind all the ways people find a specific site. Your domain name is one way, but search engines are another large source to deliver traffic also.