Keyword Rich Domain Names + SEO

3 replies
  • SEO
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Hi All,

I am new to this forum, but look forward to meeting everyone here. I decided to register after being a long time lurker

To give a little background on myself, I currently run an on-line business that sell's digital products to customers around the world.

I produce all store content myself (with the help of a team of producers) and plan to sell content from other providers by the end of March.

In all honestly I am quite new to SEO and "online business" in general, but I have a very good grasp of internet technologies, software development and anything "technical". So hopefully I can make some trusted advice to the forum members here.

At present my store dosen't bring in enough money to sustain a comfortable living, so I work full time as a Security Analyst for a large corporation. I would like this to change however, and my goal this year is to build up a series of websites that provide enough income to support my lifestyle (I guess this is everyones goal on here though!).

Up until now my business has solely been marketed/advertised on forums related to the products I produce. This has done me very well in terms of getting strong organic traffic and building up a very good customer base (as well as Facebook 'fan' page). Since the products we produce are of high quality and well respected in various communities, I have only really focused on product development and less on marketing and advertising. I was sticking to the "word of mouth" being the best to get sales, which I don't feel is enough in this day and age.

After recently discovering this forum and the Google Keyword Research Tool I found many "phrases" related to my business that have dot com domains available for them.

I am curious to know if buying up "key phrase rich" domains would be an effective strategy for growing a business and attracting strong organic traffic to it? The process would be as follows: I buy a key phrase rich domain, build a landing page for it and do basic SEO (find best keywords/phrases, index it on various search engines, etc) and let the page attract traffic. Would this be enough to get it high ranking in the Google search results if the particular market was niche and not overly competitive?

Take this scenario for example:
  1. Assume I own an on-line store that sells socks. I sell all different types of sock, but my store has a crazy name like "David's Sock Shop". Now unless people know my business name and search for that specifically my website would otherwise be much further down google lists for "sock shops" unless I invested a great deal into AdWords, directory submissions, article writing and link building strategies (Even then there is limited chance I would make the top 3 search results in google).
  2. After using the Google Keyword Research tool I discover that "Red Sports Socks" get's 11,000 EXACT searches per month. I discover the .com or .net domain name is available and I register this.
  3. I set up a basic landing page, do basic SEO and index the page/site.
  4. I set up links on the landing page that point to my site(s) and wait for re-directs to come from the various sites I set up.
  5. I keep my finger's crossed for "hits" that turn into customers!

What kind of variables should I take into account for this type of strategy and is this an advisable way to build traffic to a site?

David
#domain #keyword #names #rich #seo
  • Profile picture of the author LarryHaywood
    The overall strategy is good IMO. However, you are not counting in the link building process that is often required to pull in organic traffic. Even with low competition kw phrases, it will be hard to rank high without doing any link building. Everything else sounds pretty good to start with if you ask me...
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  • Profile picture of the author johnny_h
    It sounds like you're trying to buy domains and let the name be the only form of SEO, other than maybe a little on-page optimization, which may or may not work out for you. If there's virtually no competition for your keywords, then you probably have a good shot. However, if there's competition for the keywords you're targeting, you're going to have to do some form of link building to get those keyword rich domains to rank well for the keywords you're targeting.

    Overall, it's a really good idea. Ideally, you'd do what you're proposing as well as build some pages on your site that target these keywords, doing some form of link building for both. If you're just trying to avoid the task of building backlinks, you can always outsource.

    It sounds like you may need to do a little more research and analyze your competition before you jump into buying up keyword rich domains.
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  • Profile picture of the author MrWhippy
    Thanks for your replies guys! This kind of information is useful for me.

    Regarding link building, one of the main issues I am going to have is the lack of actual parse-able "content" on the landing pages with domains assigned (in most cases it will be very minimal). The pages will be (for the most part) just link/re-direct pages to my main website. However I have 'toyed' with the idea of making "mini" directory sites to help other friend's in the same business get traffic.

    How would you approach building back links to these type of pages? Or would you focus on building up stronger backlinks to my main website and "hope" that the landing pages attract some organic traffic?

    I guess this bring's a few more questions:

    1. If the "keyword/phrase domain" has no "exact" domains registered at all (no other TLD's taken), would this increase the chances of keyphrase domain ranking higher if nobody else was using the name (or similar names)?

    2. Would you analyze "competition" purely based on Google Keyword Tool competition values or using other tools?

    3. What kind of link building and submission strategies would you recommend for this type of business?

    Some of the other businesses/websites I plan will have actual content and I will work to build active forums on two of them. In this case, I will approach the link building more actively and not focus on this "landing page" approach but the "content being king" method.

    On that note, if I find a key phrase that has a .com domain available (and high exact searches per month) but high competition would you still recommend buying this domain or would you create your own "brand" and focus on other traffic building methods?
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