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
-
Migrating to a new domain
Hi The company I work for are planing to re-brand & come under our parent company name. This means the whole site will be moved to a new domain. Does anyone have any experience with this and can give me some useful docs to read/any advice? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Have You 301 Redirected Domain A to Domain B ?
I only have two questions.... Approximately when did you do it (year is close enough)? Did the rankings of Domain B go up? Any other information that you care to share will be appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
Changing domain for a magento store
Hi all, wondering if i could gather some views on the best approach for this please... We currently have a magento site up with about 150,000 pages (although only 9k indexed in Google as product pages are set to no index by default until the default manufacturer description has been rewritten). The indexed pages are mainly category pages, filtering options and a few search results. While none of the internal pages have massive DA - seem to average about 18-24 which isn't too bad for internal pages, I guess - I would like to transfer as much of this over to the new domain. My question is, is it really feasible to have an htaccess with about 10,000 301 redirects on the current domain? The server is pretty powerful so could probably serve the file without issue but would Google be happy with that? Would it be better to use the change url option in WMT instead. Ive never used that so not sure how that would work in this cause. Would it redirect users too? As a footnote, the site is changing because of branding reasons and not because of a penalty of the site. Thanks, Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daedriccarl0 -
A question of rankings (with actual domains)
Working with the main site featured in this Open Site Explorer comparison (you'll need a pro account to view this), and have been for quite some time. Recently we've slid behind Ebay (huge brand, I get it), but the other competitors don't really make sense to me. Main phrase is pontoon boats, and maybe I'm too close to this, but we seem to be in the best shape overall in terms of the domain, the page itself, and even our social media is pretty successful (we're closing in on 5,000 likes and have a pretty engaged audience). More internal linking is an opportunity, but I'd like another set of eyes (or several for that matter) to weigh in on opinions. I'm a bit stumped. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetvantageMarketing0 -
Redirecting Existing Domains to My Main Site
Hi I have a main property related website featuring different countries around the world. I also have many different seperate country websites 20+. All keyword rich domains with a good 9 years+ domain age and PR3's with decent links and moz rankings and unique content. Many of the sites are very low Alexa rank now and receive little traffic. I don't have the time now to spend on each of the individual domains and am wanting to consolidate them and their PR juice to the corresponding country page of my main website. My question is - is it possible - will google see this as me trying to manipulate them and is my main site likely to suffer from any penalties or downgrading? Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freecall0 -
301 of EDM domains
If I buy a keyword EDM domain and 301 redirect it to my site, will I rank better for that keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creaturmedia0 -
Sub-domain and Sub-directory - Is there no difference
Hi, Last year Google announced that it will treat links from a sub-domain as internal links and not external - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html. Does it means that now there is no difference between a sub-domain and a sub-directory and anyone of them can be used? Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Would switching domain names be a good move?
Hi All, I'm trying to decide whether to switch to a more relevant domain name for an SEO project. For a while now I've already been doing the standard SEO work on an existing website, content optimization, link building etc but I can't help feeling I won't ever get the full benefits of SEO until I also change the domain name. The current website is for a law firm in new jersey called sandz.net which obviously has no immediate impression it is for a law firm so I'm looking at setting up a new domain and doing 301s to a new site. My concerns are that as its a highly competitive market, I've initiated the campaign to target local searches so I'm wondering just how beneficial buying a domain name with the term lawyer or attorney which actually be. And of course the ideal domain names such as njlawyer, NJattorney .COMs are all taken so I would be looking at perhaps a .ORG with the intention that all printed material the firm has still contains their original name, sandz.net and by word of mouth they should tell people their site is sandz.net as its easy to remember but for the sake of SEO and links then these should all be focused on a new domain.. Any thoughts appreciated.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davebrown19750