KW Targeted Domain Format For Local Biz
-
My brother owns a laundromat...Im putting together his site.....I am targetinga small geographic area obviously....
Which domain is more seo friendly for the kw north brunswick nj laundromat?
northbrunswicknjlaundromat.com
north-brunswick-nj-laundromat.com
northbrunswick-nj-laundromat.com
northbrunswicknj-laundromat.com
I doubt there is a huge difference between any of them and my first instict was to go with "northbrunswicknjlaundromat" but it seems it may be too wordy to not use hyphens. Do search engines care?
Thanks in advance for any and all help
Nolan
-
I think you've made a smart choice, Nolan! Thanks for letting me give you my feedback and good luck with the Local SEO. It should be fun doing this for your brother. If I can be of any further assistance, please just let me know.
Miriam
-
Thanks both Istvan and Miriam for the great input.
Miriam- you read my mind...I resolved the matter earlier today when I looked to see if there were any other north brunswick's in the U.S. and sure enough there is only one.....hence eliminating the need for NJ as you said.
Already purchased the domain northbrunswicklaundromat.com ...we came to the same conclusion. Awesome. Thanks again
-
Greetings, Nolan!
Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Definitely read the article Itsvan linked to. It's a super resource.
In my opinion, the hyphens are not optimal. As the aforementioned article states, hyphenated domain names can look somewhat spammy.
Here's something for you to consider: when I do a Google search for just 'north brunswick', Google immediately shows me a map of New Jersey. I am not finding any other North Brunswicks mentioned in the top 10 results of the SERPs. I wouldn't consider the mention of NJ in your URL necessary at all, given this point. Because of this, I would consider northbrunswicklaundromat.com to be a better choice than any you have listed.
24 characters puts this on the long side, but it's certainly optimized and at least it isn't hyphenated.
I was tempted to suggest nbrunswicklaundromat.com to cut out some of the letters, but a search for that is bringing up references to NEW Brunswick.
At any rate, I think the mention of New Jersey is unnecessary. The strength of the optimization of your website is going to count most in terms of displaying strong geographic data for the bots and human users. Google should have no problem understanding where you are.
Hope this helps, and do read that article!
Miriam
-
Hi Nolan,
This article might help you with choosing: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain
Personally I would go for northbrunswick-nj-laundromat.com. This would be my choice.
Hope it helped,
Istvan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Cross Canonicalization for domains with same menu
I have a client who took 3 pages from its main website and made them into their own domains. So that now, for example,
Technical SEO | | Shrine.SEO.Gal
www.mainsite.com/page
redirects to
www.page.com This is so users can be given access to the content on that specific page with ease.
Now, www.page.com has the same menu items as www.mainsite.com, so that users who select the menu items on www.page.com will be circled back to the main site. But this means that there are now different URLs for these pages.
ie:
On www.mainsite.com there is: www.mainsite.com/menu-item
(the content resides here) And on www.page.com there is: www.page.com/menu-item
(Which is basically "scaffolding" to support the page and a means to get around, so to speak.This is to make any and all pages accessible at either domain. ) I have only seen this type of URL on the Moz campaign crawl. In the real world, when a user selects a menu item from the www.page.com, it will circle back to www.mainsite.com/menu-item SEO-wise, should I use cross-canonicalization to point www.page.com/menu-item to www.mainsite.com/menu-item? Or would this be splitting hairs since these are only seen on the Moz crawl?0 -
Domain Name Character Amount
I know that best practice is to keep your domain short, but is there an actual suggested character ballpark when coming up with one? Any thoughts are appreciated.
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
Multiple domains pointing to same site
Over the years, we have acquired a great number of variations of our domains, or industry-specific domains to protect our brand. Currently, the majority of those domains are parked at the registrars. Would we do any harm to our rankings if we pointed the dormant domains to our website (www.ellsworth.com)? If not, are there any recommendations as the best way to do this, or just point them to the same IP?
Technical SEO | | Ellsworth0 -
I grabbed a better domain name. What next?
I have been trying to rank well for the key word "National Currency" forever and can't seem to make it into the top ten. I would really like to have the URL NationalCurrency but it's taken and can't be bought. My url is nationalcurrencyvalues. After reading the forums and various other SEO advice it occurred to me that National-Currency is as good or better than NationalCurrency for that keyword because it's seen as two words. (right) So, I grabbed that domain name. Now, my question... is there some way to make use of the National-Currency domain name without building an entirely new site? I don't think I want transfer all of my content from nationalcurrencyvalues. Would there be any benefit to my nationalcurrencyvalues if I set up 303's on National-Currency?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
I think I have a penalty on my domain...
my domain is www.brighttights.com it is an affiliate marketing website in the niche of tights and lingerie. A few months back my traffic was pretty good, doing about 500 hits a day from product search terms only. After the panda updates I blocked all the product pages from google as they were duplicate content and I am now working on a program of seing for the category and homepages instead. I am using much more generic, and high volume, keywords for these. Several months later I seem to not only be down to 7 people a day on my website but i'm not even ranking for terms such as "bright tights". I used to be no1 for this. I have domain authority of 27 so it's not terrible, competitors on the first page range from 45 to 9. This lack of ranking for the sites name/domain name term is leading me to wonder if I have a penalty on the site. Any feedback would be gratefully received.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Duplicate content domains ranking successfully
I have a project with 8 domains and each domain is showing the same content (including site structure) and still all sites do rank. When I search for a specific word-string in google it lists me all 8 domains. Do you have an explanation, why Google doesn't filter those URLs to just one URL instead of 8 with the same content?
Technical SEO | | kenbrother0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0 -
Duplicate content across multiple domains
I have come across a situation where we have discovered duplicate content between multiple domains. We have access to each domain and have recently within the past 2 weeks added a 301 redirect to redirect each page dynamically to the proper page on the desired domain. My question relates to the removal of these pages. There are thousands of these duplicate pages. I have gone back and looked at a number of these cached pages in google and have found that the cached pages that are roughly 30 days old or older. Will these pages ever get removed from google's index? Will the 301 redirect even be read by google to be redirected to the proper domain and page? If so when will that happen? Are we better off submitting a full site removal request of the sites that carries the duplicate content at this point? These smaller sites do bring traffic on their own but I'd rather not wait 3 months for the content to be removed since my assumption is that this content is competing with the main site. I suppose another option would be to include no cache meta tag for these pages. Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmsobe0