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
-
301 Redirect Only Home Page/Root Domain via Domain Registrar Only
Hi All, I am really concerned about doing a 301 redirect. This is my situation: Both Current and New Domain is registered with a local domain registrar (similar to GoDaddy but a local version) Current Domain: Servers are pointing to Wix servers and the website is built and hosted with Wix I would like to do a 301 redirect but would like to do it in the following way with a couple of factors to keep in mind: 99% of my link are only pointed to the home page/root domain only. Not to subdirectories. New Domain: I will register this with wix with a new plan but keep the exact sitemap and composition of current website and launch with new domain. Current Domain: I want to change server pointing to wix to point to local domain registrar servers. Then do a 301 redirect for only the home page/root domain to point to the new domain listed with wix. So 301 is done via local registrar and not via Wix. Another point to mention is it will also change from Http to Https as well as a name change. Your comments on the above will be greatly appreciated and as to whether there is risk in trying to do a 301 redirect as above. Doing it as above it also cheaper if I do the 301 via the wix platform I will need to register a full new premium plan and run it concurrently to the old plan whereas if I do it as mentioned above will only have the additional domain annual fee. Look forward to your comments. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeBlue10 -
New Domain, No 301 Possible - Any Advice
A client of mine lost their domain when an ex business partner sold it out from under them. They've filed with WIPO, but in the meantime we're trying to figure out how to help them out. They had two really excellent links - one from the NY Times and one from a .edu website. I'm going to reach out to the authors of those articles (the articles are pretty old, so I doubt they'll change the links), but does anyone have any advice on how to let search engines know the new domain replaces the old without having the ability to do redirects? The content on the site is exactly the same - we were able to get the files over, happily. I've re-submitted the site for indexing, changed the domain links in Moz Local, changed in Analytics, and on all their social sites. Is there anything I'm not thinking of that can be done to let Google know that this new domain replaces the old? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | newwhy0 -
Dramatic drop in Domain Authority
I have a client who has reported a drop in Domain Authority from 16 to 1 in a matter of a few weeks. Also, MOZ was reporting links, but now none! I know there were some issues with the recent MOZ index update. However, this sounds like something else. Anyone got ideas on where we should start looking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Domain Change Of Address & Sale
Hi Moz community Let's say I have two domains www.domain1.com www.domain2.com domain1 is my main website. Domain 2 was a peripheral side project I was working on. I recently decided to shut it down. So I hooked up the proper 301s and filed a change of address request with Google Webmaster tools. I have had an offer for someone to purchase domain2 - I have absolutely no use for it and would like to sell it. I just want first to figure out that: I can do this without losing any ranking to my main site. I can disassociate this domain from myself and my Company completely. I don't want any of the work we put into it to transfer to the new owner. How can I do this? thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shop-Sq0 -
Do industry specific domains help SEO?
Hi everyone, I've looked for an answer to this but I can't find one. Hopefully someone can help! I have a new client that is a builder. They currently have a .co.uk domain (e.g. businessname.co.uk) Would it help them if the website was businessname_.builders_ instead? Thanks, Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebsiteAbility0 -
Redirect ot new domain
Hello, Can someone give me advice on this specific situation: For now we have a website www.website.com/ Because of some specific business situation we want to move to .ca version but also we want to keep website.com - for U.S customers. Here's how I imagined to do this: 301 Redirect from www.website.com to website.ca. Because at this time website.com redirects to www.website.com I would remove the redirect and just keep it like website.com (so this will be new domain). Is this is the right solution? Regards, Nenad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Uniline0 -
Sub Domains vs. Persistent URLs
I've always been under the assumption that when building a micro-site it was better to use a true path (e.g. yourcompany.com/microsite) URL as opposed to a sub domain (microsite.yourcompany.com) from an SEO perspective. Can you still generate significant SEO gains from a sub domain if you were forced to use it providing the primary (e.g. yourcompany.com) had a lot of link clout/authority? Meaning, if I had to go the sub domain route would it be the end of the world?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
How to move website to new domain?
We have a website that has run under the same domain name for the past 10 years. We have built up a decent amount of SEO "mojo" (and traffic) over time, however, the original domain name no longer applies to the business model. A little over 1 year ago we started using a new brand name for the website and created a landing page for that domain name. Everything on that landing page links over to pages on the original domain name (to preserve the SEO value that we have built up over the years). We would like to move all (or most) of the pages/content to the new domain name. Would using 301 redirects be the safest, most effective way of doing this? I have heard of other people doing it this way, and often they will see their traffic drop for a few weeks before it eventually comes back. Anyone else had experience with this? What worked? What didn't? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-mojo0