It's not mandatory but it helps a lot in ranking quicker, all other things being equal. Also, don't know where you are looking but I can find micro niche EMDs all the time, even dot coms.

Exact Match Domain is the most important on page SEO factor and can have a crucial impact on your rankings and how "hard" you will need to work in order to rank high.

If an exact match domain is not available, you should add a suffix which is said to be better than a prefix as it is important to have your keyword in the beginning of the domain URL.

Exact match domain is obviously the best, if you can't get it put a prefix or suffix on to the domain. I recently did a test with hyphen v's suffix and the suffix seemed to work better, not sure what everyone else's experience is though?

My question is this.. when using "close" exact match URL's, how much can I play with the keyword? If my idea is for a "City+Keyword" URL (for example: BuffaloPlumber.com) how much can I tweak it and still have Google rank it? How about "MyBuffaloPlumber" or "TheBuffaloPlumber" ... how much of a negative impact (if any) will that have on my ability to rank the site?

Thanks;
Bill S.

Some words are considered stop words by Google and ignored:

the, by, with, for, and

so TheBuffaloPlumber would be just as good as BuffaloPlumber.

The main point is to get your keywords in order in the domain name. I also like to use a suffix since that keeps my main keywords up front. Using a suffix, you can add a little bit of 'human engineering' to your domain.

BuffaloPlumberReviews
BuffaloPlumberSite
BuffaloPlumberService
etc....

Exact matching domain names are not mandatory, but they can give a significant boost to your site.

If you cannot get an exact matching domain go for a keyword rich domain.

But go for the exact match whenever possible imho.

so, what is perfect sufffix to add, I've seen terry kyle website gasxxxxxxxxxxwasherhq.com , he add "hq" suffix and he rank #4
and for keyword thick yoga mat, thethickyogamat.com rank #2 below amazon and outrank two other exact keyword org,net

this all new domain about 1 year

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Couple quick thoughts on the overall question. There is no doubt EMD is a plus factor, but, for example, search "Buffalo Plumber" or Buffalo Plumbers" and you will see only one or two exact match domains in the top ten. So it is certainly not essential to have that EMD.

As for a suffix word? "World" has often worked well for me on a number of sites/niches. The "global" connotation seems to help, psychologically if not technologically.

Going back to the original EMD question and plumbers in Buffalo. In every search there is always one of more top ten results with a form like: www.plumberdirectory.com/buffalo so for my money, unless I am getting paid to rank someone's single site specifically, I would focus on "keywordphrase.com" with a subdirectory for every local area I become interested in.

Top results is top ten results, and you only have to buy one domain name for innumerable locations. I'm not really smart about this stuff ... but Google is. The SERPS themselves will teach you a lot about what Google values, if you study them.

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