Brand Name Domains and Google Shopping Results

If you are a Niche marketer, like myself, who focuses on Micro Niche Markets as opposed to "Make money online" or other over saturated large markets, then this little post may be of interest to you.

I help a lot of other Niche Marketers with their Micro Niche Marketing efforts and two questions come up almost every day from people looking for advice, I have decided to make this post as a reference to anyone else who may be looking for the answers.

Question 1
"What do you think about having brand names in your domain name?"

Question 2
"Is it possible to out rank Google Shopping results?"

Let's deal with question 1 first. Now firstly, a little disclaimer: This is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer and do not know a huge amount about Brand protection law etc. This information is for discussion purposes only, so make sure you also do your own research.

Using a brand name in your domain name can be risky, however if you are targeting a long tail keyword phrase which happens to contain a brand name then it can be quite an effective component of getting your niche web site to rank.

Some companies could not be bothered as ultimately more of their product is being sold through your web site, so as long as your are not misrepresenting their brand or misrepresenting your web site as being an "official company web site" then most of the times, I have not had a problem.

I have built hundreds of successful Niche web sites and only once have I run into a legal problem with a brand name domain name. I had set up a web site which sold Harley Davidson clothing via Amazon and the domain name had "Harley Davidson" in it. About 3 Weeks after the site going live, I received a legal letter from Harley Davidson requesting me to Hand over the domain name. In this case, I began a civilised conversation with their legal department and at the end of the day I ended up taking the web site down and deleting the domain name. They were happy with that and that was the end of it.

So, you need to weigh up the risk versus reward for yourself, The reward being that you could have a Niche web site performing well in the SERPS and making lots of sales, and the risk being that all your effort in creating and promoting the site could end with you having to take it down.

Now for Question 2...

For a long time, Google Shopping results have been displayed at the very top of the search results, just below any Adwords that may appear horizontally. These display prices from stores who have published data feeds into Google base and have always had a very high click through rate.

Over the past few months I have noticed that more often than not, these Google shopping results are now being blended into the Search results which, in my opinion is a much fairer way of displaying them as they rank equally amongst other web sites without being given major preference.

This is good news for us who promote product specific keywords and has resulted in much higher traffic numbers for my sites that used to sit below Google shopping results. Let us hope that this stays this way.



Would love to hear your thoughts/experiences on these topics.
Cheers
Nick