Client hell bent on grabbing a competitive .net domain
-
Hi all,
Firstly, i'm a content guy! Thrown into SEO at the deep end, but absolutley loving it and the community.
I need some advice, so i'm popping my cherry with this one:
I have a client who is in the service industry, very competitive and in a City, so it's all local. He has branded site that has had little investment in SEO and a huge PPC spend over the years. After a lot of nagging they are getting the message that PPC is a massive money tap and as soon as it's turned off that's it - gone!
They have had conversations and hit me up with this as their want.
Example: They see www.londoncakebakers.com / .co.uk which is a site belonging to Smiths Cakes.
They have spotted that www.londoncakebakers.net is free to purchase! You know what's coming right?
They want to buy it, get me to design a site for it and deploy SEO on it in a big way! The key phrases are all in the domain name and all the obvious benefits. Am I over thinking this and should embrace it, or should I advise, no, no, no?
Thanks in advance.
Mark
-
Thanks Keri,
Yes the domains I gave were examples not the real domains, to demonstrate a service industry.
That was in my thinking, however, as it's a service and that service being "cake baking in London" and not www.smithscakes.com and my client buying "www.smithscakes.net, i was a tad unsure but after some research i "think" that should be fine as there are no TM infringements. Also the .com owner leads the visitor not by saying welcome to "domain name" but welcome to "brand name".
So they would be competing on service not brand.
Hope that helps shed a bit more light on it for you. Lesson there to structure my inital post with more meat on the bones.
Thanks
Mark
-
I don't know if these are sample or actual domains, but also consider if there is a chance of any legal implications of choosing a similar domain -- for example if you tried to register google.co and put up a search engine, Google would have issues with that.
-
Still reading and blown away with the speed and quality of advice, it's excellent and I can see the talent pool is worth keeping in touch with. I hope I can help you guys out with content or design related questions sometime.
Thanks again
Mark
-
You two flatter me greatly.
I can honestly say that I learnt from the best community and the best within the community, present company included.
Mark, if you're still reading at this point, you'd do very well to heed advice from these two, plus so so many others in this community. Enjoy your time here!
-
Yes, I am starting to read any of his posts that I see.
-
Tom,
This was a very, very good explanation. Thanks
-
Thanks for that.
They are quite realistic really and know it will bring fewer clicks but more targeted visits based on the theory of EMD vs Searchers queries. I was really not too sure of the value of the .net myself so thanks for that.
More food for thought
Cheers
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the really good reply there. It's very much an echo of my gut feeling.
I think i'm going to plump for, picking up the domain name, creating the clients site, putting 80% of SEO efforts into the branded site and the other 20% at keeping the exact match on the go as almost a side project, as they will hoover up some clicks based on the search term.
Thanks again for the welcome and the advice, it's much appreciated.
Mark
-
Hi Mark,
It's not a big deal, more work if anything.
But I don't believe that .net EMD will bring any exact match boost, only the .co.uk and .com will really give you that (I have done some work with EMD's and that's what I have found).
I suppose the only thing to worry about is if it takes a little longer to rank because it's fresh, im guessing they want the EMD because they think it will have some sort of magical powers to jump to page 1?
-
Hi Mark
Welcome to the community mate!
My advice would be to be purchase the domain if they insist, but focus all of your SEO and marketing efforts on their branded website. And here's why:
Two things were apparent in 2012. First, Google were targeting low quality Exact Match Domains (EMD), which the one you mentioned above would be initially They released an EMD update that you can read about here.
That's not to say that EMDs do not work if they are a quality website - they absolutely can. But the playing field, as it were, has become a lot more level, so if you have two sites with identical "strength", but one has a branded URL and one an exact match URL, Google is really working towards making the EMD not have an advantage over the other - and I'd say they're very nearly there.
Now, you could invest your SEO and search marketing on the new domain and make it an 'authority' site, but I would much rather stick with using the brand URL. Another thing that was apparent in 2012 with all of the updates that were released, particularly Penguin, is that Google is starting to favour brands and authority websites that come with it.
From a marketing perspective in general, I'd also advise your team to stick with a branded URL. The entire digital marketing scene is coming much more in line with normal marketing practices (mainly down to digital marketing now becoming the primary marketing channel of them all) and Google is certainly trying to reflect this when it comes to SEO. If you have a branded URL you're always promoting brand awareness, you can build on your name and reputation online and there's no mistaking your identity.
Deploy your SEO to the branded URL. It might be worth picking up the URL anyway and see if there's something you can do with it in the future (maybe your company could host a London-wide competition for bakers and market it under that URL, for example), domains are relatively cheap now anyway.
Hope this helps and welcome aboard once again!
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
-
Same server for different client sites?
Hi everyone - I have a question about whether it's OK for us to host several of our client's websites on the same dedicated web server, without this causing problems in SEO. I know the issues with duplicate content etc., but for background - we provide website services to a particular sector (antiques/auctions). All our clients are distinct, and have written their own copy etc., but because they're all in the same sector, their websites will - largely - talk about the same types of things - so the content is not duplicated, but it's similar in topic, I guess. Does anyone feel it would cause a problem if we were to put several (say about 😎 of our client's websites on the same dedicated web server, or would we be better spreading the sites over different shared servers? Come to think about it, if we are spreading those same 8 sites across 4 virtual servers - but all hosted by the same company - presumably Google would know that too? Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this! Nikki
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Go-Auction0 -
Domain Level Redirects - HTTP and HTTPS
About 2 years ago (well before I started with the company), we did an http=>https migration. It was not done correctly. The http=>https redirect was never inserted into the .htaccess file. In essence, we have 2 websites. According to Google search console, we have 19,000 HTTP URLs indexed and 9,500 HTTPS URLs indexed. I've done a larger scale http=>https migration (60,000 SKUs), and our rankings dropped significantly for 6-8 weeks. We did this the right way, using sitemaps, and http and https GSC properties. Google came out recently and said that this type of rankings drop is normal for large sites. I need to set the appropriate expectations for management. Questions: How badly is the domain split affecting our rankings, if at all? Our rankings aren't bad, but I believe we are underperforming our backlink profile. Can we expect a net rankings gain when the smoke clears? There are a number of other technical SEO issues going on as well. How badly will our rankings drop (temporarily) and for how long when we add the redirect to the .htaccess file? Is there a way to mitigate the rankings impact? For example, only submitting partial sitemaps to our GSC http property? Has anyone gone through this before?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
No Domain Authority after 6 weeks
Hi, We have just launched a new e-commerce site and 301'd a lot of the products and categories to the new site. I have also added a link or 2 from other domains. We launched it on 10th of June - but still using site explorer, there is no domain authority showing - just a 1. Why is that? Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Is it safe to 301 redirect old domain to new domain after a manual unnatural links penalty?
I have recently taken on a client that has been manually penalised for spammy link building by two previous SEOs. Having just read this excellent discussion, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience I am weighing up the odds of whether it's better to cut losses and recommend moving domains. I had thought under these circumstances it was important not to 301 the old domain to the new domain but the author (Lewis Sellers) comments on 3/4/13 that he is aware of forwards having been implemented without transferring the penalty to the new domain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience#jtc216689 Is it safe to 301? What's the latest thinking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy0 -
URL or Domain length
Hi All, I am wondering if google still does give importance to the length of the domain or url. If yes then how much is the acceptable length of a domain and URL. Many Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
Redirection Effects on Sub Domain
Hi, I would try to summarize my query through an example. Lets say site A (www.siteA.com) have two sub domain (subdomain1.siteA.com & subdomain2.siteA.com) and another site B ( www.siteB.com ) have no sub domain. Due to some obvious reason we need re direct the site site A (www.siteA.com) to site B ( www.siteB.com ) and one of the sub domain (subdomain1.siteA.com) to site B (subdomain1.siteB.com). Now the question is that in case of ( subdomain2.siteA.com ) can we keep the sub domain to site A even though site A has been re directed to site B ? Reasons for keeping this can be traffic, earnings etc. Is it possible to keep it like that or provision for further optimization? Plz help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ITRIX0 -
.co.uk to .com - Transfer of domain
After having our site up for over a year and gaining PR 3 and more than a dozen page 1 rankings on Google for most of our competitive terms, we have realised we have to transfer to .com from our current .co.uk URL for legal reasons. What would the best way be to carry out such a move in an SEO perspective?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qtasad0 -
Different Geographies - New Domain or Subdomain?
I have a site that is successful on the SERPs for a certain geography, let's call it City A (I'm sure you can't tell what it is from my username). I'm moving to a new city in another state so I will be building my business in this area (City B). Should I create a new domain for City B with CityBWebsiteDesign.com or should I create a sub-domain called CityB.BrandableCompanyName.com and just redirect CityBWebsiteDesign.com to the URL for offline marketing purposes only? My current website BrandableCompanyName.com has some authority with Google. Will it be better to building something on the sub-domain and get any sort of cross-benefits or are there really no benefits to be had between sub-domains? The benefit of going with CityBWebsiteDesign.com would be having a keyword rich URL but I would basically be starting from zero with building authority. Specific experience you've had with this or cited examples would be great for the discussion! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredDetroit
Jared0