Which domain is better - a Long descriptive or Short Abbreviated?
-
I want to start a new company and have an option to have a long and descriptive domain or buy out the 5 letter Abbreviated domain for $2000.
abstract example:
LegalMigrationServiceCapeTown.com
V.S.
LMSCT.comThe advantage of the shorter domain is that it is 13 years old.
so now for the SEO - which one do you think is better? is Exact Match Domain a better thing for SEO or can I get away with a shorter domain?I can buy both, but which one should I build on as the main domain?
any advice would be much appreciated, as well as the PROS & CONS of both.
-
Hello everyone,
Dana, Moosa, Francisco.Thanks so much for your input, I really appriciate it
I have come to a point where I need to make a decision:
My brand is a South African Band, but we target an international clientele.
Should I buy the .COM or the .CO.ZA ?We would like to rank for mostly other countries, but south africa is important too.
Thanks,
Best Regards
Nikita -
I would highly agree with Dana here!
Instead of moving towards exact match domain you should try to go for the domain that offers more branding opportunities!
I really like the idea by Dana here and that is to go for a domain that contain your brand name and stick to it... you can use the exact match domain and redirect it to your main domain but your main domain should be short and contain branding opportunities.
Hope this helps!
-
Yes, Nikita, I think you've got the gist of it and you are on the right track. Good luck!
-
Thanks, the company I am branding specialises in allowing people to Migrate to South Africa, and we are based in Cape Town. The actual name is different, i just prefer not expose it until I actually buy it.
We have plenty EMD's in the niche, we use them as landing pages.
But as I understand google is less and less concerned about the domain name containing keywords.
From the Answers so far; I gather I must concentrate on the "BRAND" regardless of a short or long domain, and spend time building that up.thanks
-
I personally think both are hard to remember. It's been 30 seconds since I read your post and I already forgot the domain name. There are two things I would do. The 1st one is what Dana suggests to use your "current" brand if you have one. The second one, assuming the "current" brand is too difficult to remember, is to buy an EASY to remember brand.
I am PERSONALLY in the process of immigrating my wife so I am probably almost the perfect guy to ask.
My Google search here in San Diego would have been something like "San Diego immigration services", "San Diego immigration lawyer", "San Diego legal immigration". Any of those searches can be a brandable domain. Since these are probably taken, i would contact the owners of the websites using domaintools.com and doing a whois search. You can buy many domains for less than $1000. Other brandable domains would be weimmigrate.com, immigrationlawyers.com, legalimmigration.com, greencardservices.com (because that's what it's for, the green card), permanentresident.com, whatever.com.... you get what I'm saying.
Oh wait, you're not targeting "immigrants". You're targeting people who are migrating. So now I'm a little confused; migrating out of USA or into USA (backbutton, bye!).
-
This is a great question and great example. The first thing I want to know is, what is your brand name? Do you have a brand name? I understand that "legal migration service in Cape Town" is what your business does, but is that the brand name as well? If not, and you do have a brand name, I'd go for the brand name, personally.
If you don't have a brand name yet, I would consider making "LMSCT" the brand name, and brand the hell out of it. Yes, and make it the URL too.
I wouldn't go for the EMD. That brings with it too much potential risk (IMHO) in terms of potential algortihm updates that are hurting EMDs and rewarding brands. Besides, the EMD is extremely long and hard to remember. Another thing to keep in mind is when and if you do paid advertising, that EMD is so long that it's most likely going to tap out the character limitations of a lot of ads, and take away room that you could have used for your marketing purposes.
That's my two cents. Interested to know what other people think!
Dana
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
-
How to implement meta descriptions for accelerated mobile pages with WordPress?
Is there a way in which meta descriptions can be altered on AMP pages? The meta description is not pulling from the original page for each post, and current plugins such as Yoast/Glue for Yoast & AMP by Automattic do not appear to offer customisation of titles/meta descriptions. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | SamClicks0 -
New Domain, Subdomain or Subfolder
Hi All, I am working with a bank that would like to rank as many parts of the company site as possible for the company name. This includes the home page, a page on careers and a page on company reviews. The question is, it is better to structure the careers and reviews content on a subfolder, subdomain or new domain. Using subfolders to retain equity of the root domain site.americanbank.comamernicanbank.com/careersamericanbank.com/reviews or (use subdomains - you lose some of the main domain equity and it is counter to the Moz research) americanbank.comcareers.americanbank.comreviews.americanbank.com or set up new domains to overcome Google bias not to rank the same root domain in the top 7 to 10 results multiple times when displaying results for a company name. americanbank.comhttp://americanbankcareers.comhttp://americanbankreviews.com Thanks for your perspective.
Algorithm Updates | | BetterAnalytics0 -
New Website Old Domain - Still Poor Rankings after 1 Year - Tagging & Content the culprit?
I've run a live wedding band in Boston for almost 30 years, that used to rank very well in organic search. I was hit by the Panda Updates August of 2014, and rankings literally vanished. I hired an SEO company to rectify the situation and create a new WordPress website -which launched January 15, 2015. Kept my old domain: www.shineband.com Rankings remained pretty much non-existent. I was then told that 10% of my links were bad. After lots of grunt work, I sent in a disavow request in early June via Google Wemaster Tools. It's now mid October, rankings have remained pretty much non-existent. Without much experience, I got Moz Pro to help take control of my own SEO and help identify some problems (over 60 pages of medium priority issues: title tag character length and meta description). Also some helpful reports by www.siteliner.com and www.feinternational.com both mentioned a Duplicate Content issue. I had old blog posts from a different domain (now 301 redirecting to the main site) migrated to my new website's internal blog, http://www.shineband.com/best-boston-wedding-band-blog/ as suggested by the SEO company I hired. It appears that by doing that -the the older blog posts show as pages in the back end of WordPress with the poor meta and tile issues AS WELL AS probably creating a primary reason for duplicate content issues (with links back to the site). Could this most likely be viewed as spamming or (unofficial) SEO penalty? As SEO companies far and wide daily try to persuade me to hire them to fix my ranking -can't say I trust much. My plan: put most of the old blog posts into the Trash, via WordPress -rather than try and optimize each page (over 60) adjusting tagging, titles and duplicate content. Nobody really reads a quick post from 2009... I believe this could be beneficial and that those pages are more hurtful than helpful. Is that a bad idea, not knowing if those pages carry much juice? Realize my domain authority not great. No grand expectations, but is this a good move? What would be my next step afterwards, some kind of resubmitting of the site, then? This has been painful, business has fallen, can't through more dough at this. THANK YOU!
Algorithm Updates | | Shineband1 -
Google sets brand/domain name at the end of SERP titles
Hi all, I am experiencing that Google puts our domain name at the end of the titles in SERPs. So if ia have a title: "See our super cool website", Google would show "See our super cool website - Betxpert.com" in the SERPs Well. This is okay. Apart from the fact that i myself often put the brand name in the title AND the fact that Google mispells the site name. The brand is BetXpert with a upper case X...so when i get a SERP with "See our super cool website - BetXpert - Betxpert.com" I am annoyed 🙂 Any one out the know how to tell Google the EXACT brand name, such that they do not set a value the site owner does not want to have? -Rasmus
Algorithm Updates | | rasmusbang0 -
Traffic drop only affecting google country domains
Hello, I have noticed that our our traffic is down by 15% (last 30 days to the 30 days before it) and I dug deeper to figure out whats going on and I am not sure I understand what is happening. Traffic from google country domains( for example google.com.sa) dropped by 90% on the 18th of September, same applies to other country specific domains. Now my other stats (visits organic keywords, search queries in WMT) seem to be normal and have seem some decrease (~5%) but nothing as drastic as the traffic drop from the google country domains. Is this an https thing that is masking the source of the traffic that came into effect on that date? Is the traffic that is now missing from google country domains being reported from other sources? Can anyone shed some light on what is going on? qk0CS7X
Algorithm Updates | | omarfk0 -
How to Change Geo Target Location of Country Specific Domain
Hi - I have a country specific domain (www.updater.in), used it for writing blog articles Now when i go to site settings in Webmaster - the Geo target by default is coming for India, and no option of changing geographic target. Is there any way to let Search Engines know (despite .in domain) that site Geo Location is not country specific, but is meant for users from all across !!
Algorithm Updates | | Modi0 -
Keyword rich domains
Can you share your experience about Keyword rich domains; do they still hold same value as before?
Algorithm Updates | | ShashankGupta0 -
Is it ok to repeat part of a meta-description across multiple pages?
For example, what if I was to conclude each meta-description tag with the line... "Free shipping for orders over $90." The rest of the meta-description tag on every page is unique, but the last sentence would be the same or at least similar. Thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | B-man0