Never underestimate this ranking advantage
- SEO |
About 6 weeks ago I created a new site about a certain medical procedure that is starting to become popular here in the UK. I registered a domain, installed Wordpress and added a few sentences to the homepage and a couple of images I bought online. I then abandoned the site with the intention of coming back to do more to it at a later date as I'm currently working on other projects which are more important.
Yesterday I happened to check the site's analytics and noticed there was traffic coming from Bing, Yahoo and Google, but mostly from Bing. I was surprised to see the site was ranking in the #1 spot for the primary keyword. Not some obscure long tail term, but a single word keyword as well as many other head terms. Outranking all the authority sites in the niche without a single backlink and virtually no content (2 short paragraphs). I checked Yahoo and saw the same there. #1 on page 1 for head terms. On Google the site isn't anywhere to be seen.
The domain I registered was a .co.uk so it's clear that there is a massive ranking advantage on Bing and Yahoo by registering a .co.uk containing the keyword you want to rank for. The keyword is the only word in the domain. The reason it's ranking isn't because of backlinks or having lots of quality content. Even the title tag isn't very well optimized but I'm leaving it alone.
This is no coincidence as the same thing has happened now with 3 different sites, all .co.uk's all ranking #1 for their primary keywords without a backlink and very little content.
From looking at the Google keyword planner I've discovered that there are many .co.uk domains still available to register for terms with 10K+ searches a month. These keywords are e-commerce related. Obviously the search volumes will be lower on Bing and Yahoo but you can easily get traffic without doing any off-page SEO or spending time writing quality content.
Has anyone else had good experiences with Bing and ranking geo-targeted sites with .co.uk domains or other top level domains?
Yesterday I happened to check the site's analytics and noticed there was traffic coming from Bing, Yahoo and Google, but mostly from Bing. I was surprised to see the site was ranking in the #1 spot for the primary keyword. Not some obscure long tail term, but a single word keyword as well as many other head terms. Outranking all the authority sites in the niche without a single backlink and virtually no content (2 short paragraphs). I checked Yahoo and saw the same there. #1 on page 1 for head terms. On Google the site isn't anywhere to be seen.
The domain I registered was a .co.uk so it's clear that there is a massive ranking advantage on Bing and Yahoo by registering a .co.uk containing the keyword you want to rank for. The keyword is the only word in the domain. The reason it's ranking isn't because of backlinks or having lots of quality content. Even the title tag isn't very well optimized but I'm leaving it alone.
This is no coincidence as the same thing has happened now with 3 different sites, all .co.uk's all ranking #1 for their primary keywords without a backlink and very little content.
From looking at the Google keyword planner I've discovered that there are many .co.uk domains still available to register for terms with 10K+ searches a month. These keywords are e-commerce related. Obviously the search volumes will be lower on Bing and Yahoo but you can easily get traffic without doing any off-page SEO or spending time writing quality content.
Has anyone else had good experiences with Bing and ranking geo-targeted sites with .co.uk domains or other top level domains?
