Choosing A Domain NAme for Local....

Unless the client desperately wants to have their business name in the domain name, I will always recommend we use a locally keyworded domain - i.e. plumberlondon.com or electricianinbrighton.com.

There are enough variations of most keywords to ensure that we can get an attractive domain which along with some effective marketing, will generate a lot more business for them.

If a client really wants just their business name in the domain, or they already have a site - I like to use it as a great opportunity to sell a lead generating keyworded website to them which will run alongside their main site. I have a couple of clients who have multiple lead generation websites because of the various aspects of their business. One of my best clients has 4 websites for his business and they're in position #1 #2 #3 and #5 on page 1 for the majority of his keywords!

Your customer will rely on your expertise and knowledge to generate them money. As long as you increase their business, they're not going to argue with you in the long run. You're the expert, give them the best advice you can!

What I do is build the site on a local seo friendly domain , then for branding purposes redirect thier company domain to the Same site. Once they start seeing most traffic coming from the local domain , gives me the opportunity to show what multiple lead generation sites can do. once they see the results , there is truly no stopping them. I am working with 2 businesses right now that want to dominate the first page of the search engines for thief terms , with multiple sites. They could care less about 1st page , what they become addicted to are the results. Give good results and will more clients than you can handle. All the best.

If you can do two, do it, but if just one and you want to rank easlily go with the keyword rich domain. If it's not too high competition for that type of local business it will rank fairly easily.

I've seen cases where just a keyword rich domain is put up on wordpress with no cotent and is on page one within days.

I agree with the others about the KW rich domain names.
Not only do they work very well, but you'll find that a lot of those local KW domains are still available!

Keywords in the domain but don't over do it. .com always preferred but I see plenty of .net and .org do well, as well as .biz. You can also get a "stickier" domain to use in print marketing. Have it redirect to the keyword based domain. When linking online, stick to your keyword rich domain.

thanks everyone for your great feedback

This is something I heard about recently. I haven't had personal experience with it, but it makes sense.

One thing to be careful about if you get a keyword domain is when you list their business in the different directories, make sure you use their ORIGINAL name. For example, say you have Bob's Plumbing and this business is in Dallas. You're able to get the domain dallasplumbing.com for the business, and so you do. But if you do, when you list with directories and the like, make sure you list the business as "Bob's Plumbing" and not "Dallas Plumbing" or even "Bob's Dallas Plumbing."

The reason for this is when places like Google collect info from all the different directories, if there isn't an exact match (compared to what was already out there), they might treat it as two different businesses, thereby giving you less juice.