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How Important Is Your Domain Name?

Posted by Paul B | October 24, 2007 .

Not how important sounding, but how important in terms of SEO and getting that natural search traffic! I’ve read huge amounts of material about how to pick a domain name, the importance of branding vs. the significance the search engines put on the keywords in your domain. Personally I’ve nearly always based mine on search phrases (with a name like themakemoneyonline.net go figure) and it’s never failed me yet. My advice to clients is similar as well, what I’ve found when working with the “average” web user is that they use search to find what they are looking for (even if they know the domain), very few normal users type a URL in directly. This makes it entirely possible to brand the actual look of your pages with your company name (for people searching for your company) but to put it all under a search optimised domain name. One thing worth doing here is also buying your company name for e-mail hosting, the last thing you want is customers emailing you at sales@mybiglongsearchfriendlydomain.com

Now above I said I nearly always use keywords in my domain names, however 12 months ago I started a domain to try out the branded approach. I can’t reveal the niche because it’s one of my 2 main money earners but I do already have a few successful websites in the same area so I had a rough idea of what to expect in terms of traffic and money. My experiment with this officially ended in July, my attempt at a short catchy domain was as far as I’m concerned a disaster. Search traffic compared to my other domains was barely 5%, the money I made was slightly better but still only around 10% of the earnings I would see with the other websites. This was all with equal page rank and an equal amount of effort put in, it was a newer domain but that was the only difference.

Around the beginning of September I finally decided a change was in order so I created a new search optimised domain and moved the EXACT same content under my new domain. I was very careful to remove any traces of the old domain from Google via the webmaster tools. Anybody want to have a guess at what if any difference this has made, remembering that this is a brand new domain name with no PR and no trust? Well in the 4 or so weeks it has been indexed it has made as much money as the previous domain did in 6 months. 4 weeks for 6 months earnings. Search traffic is roughly 30% of my other domains and increasing every week.

So what has all this taught me? I’ve learnt that either I’m rubbish at branding or very few websites are successful brands, of all the websites you’ve visited in the last year how many can you remember the URL off? On the other hand anybody with the right amount of keyword research can create a domain name that will help attract natural search traffic. Given those odds I think I’ll stick with my keyword approach for now.

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5 Comments so far
  1. Marguerite Jasmin HAITI Windows 2000 Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8  October 24, 2007 6:12 pm

    Hi. I was wondering, does it make a difference whether you use a .net or .com or .co.uk domain name with your keyword approach?

  2. Paul B UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8  October 24, 2007 8:58 pm

    I always start with a .com if good one is available, for a global interest website the fallback is a .net or if UK only then .co.uk

    If you’re based in the UK then I’d always go for a .co.uk domain for your e-mail domain.

    Another very good option for short keyword domains is .im domains although they are not cheap.

  3. Marguerite Jasmin HAITI Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8  October 25, 2007 12:23 am

    Thank you for the response Paul, I mean M. Barlow! I have one more question. There is a trend nowadays to buy domain names with hyphens which many times allows you to have good keywords with a not too long domain name. Is it a good idea to get a domain with an hyphen if I can get it with the desired keywords and if it’s not too long?

  4. Paul B UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8  October 25, 2007 10:21 am

    I don’t mind going to a maximum of 2 hyphens, any more than that looks a bit dodgy to me.

  5. Marguerite Jasmin HAITI Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8  October 25, 2007 4:24 pm

    Thanks Paul!