Has anyone had any success buying a local domain website, getting it on first page and then selling it to a local business? I have found some good domains that this might work for but I am wondering if anybody has tried this before.
-
I would like to buy a local domain like scottsdalepaintingcontractor.com and then seo it to first page before I sell it. Has anybody tried such strategy?
-
Thanks to David, Patrick, and EGOL for their great answers. You all help make Q&A such a great place!
-
I know a guy who is a gem hunter. He goes out looking for tourmaline, topaz, garnet, etc. He found a big pocket of tourmaline crystals. Lots of them were gem material, many of them were specimen grade. He estimated their value at about 1/2 million.
A couple of his buddies were joking about him rolling in dough and being on Easy Street. He told them... "Hey, it is going to take me 25 shows, 10000 miles of driving, 25 five-day road trips, 50 days of packing and unpacking, 125 days and nights on the road, about a year's worth of wages for employees to attend the shows with me, all of those meals on the road and hotel costs, another year of waves to have the specimens cleaned, labeled, weighed, identified, assessed and labled to be marketable... all of that on top of leases, excavation equipment and miner's wages to get them out of the ground, There might be a few bucks left.
-
I appreciate hearing from somebody that has personal experience doing this and can vouch for their results. Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question.
-
When you break it down into dollars you make a valid point that this is not worth my time whatsoever.
-
Thanks Patrick. Glad you liked it.
-
Bradley,
David is right in terms of your time vs your return if you sell. I had the same idea about buying up domains (lots of them) in hopes to build a few, rank them, generate leads for businesses, then sell them or continue to build leads. It was a mess, expensive, time consuming and something I won't do again. Our return was low, if any on most. We just sold a bunch of the domains last year. Out of sight. Out of mind.
EGOL, the way you responded to this question is amazing. I enjoyed reading it and agree wholeheartedly with you.
All the best, Bradley. - Patrick
-
Selling an existing local website is like trying to sell used goods... or fixer-upper houses.
It ain't gonna suit. When you find a buyer you are going to have to repaint, rebrand, and they ain't gonna like the domain that you picked out.
The guys who do painting here already have a brand. The name that was used when they were baptized and the name that they have done biz under for the past twenty years. They will not want BugtusslePainters.com. People who search will see it and react.... WhoTF is that? Where is TomThePainter ?
That painting contractor is not going to know the value of a website, the plumber is not going to know the value of a website.
Now, if you want to make money selling a ranked website make one in an industry where people know how much they are worth. Get a site ranking for Texas Hold'em. You will have people fightin' to get it.
-
Something wise my father once told me "Something is only worth how much someone is willing to pay for it."
It depends. First, how much of your time is going to be invested in creating, optimizing, and ranking this site? Since it sounds like this is something you are going to do with multiple domains, it could get pretty time-consuming.
Also, if you know how to get websites to page one, why are you not marketing that to potential clients and consumers? Trying to get a keyword driven domain to rank high and sell it off for a quick buck doesn't really seem like a good investment, either time wise, or for the success of your company. I would use sites that you have ranked high as an example of what you can do for clients, and sign them up for a monthly fee, rather than trying to sell them a "get rich quick" domain.
Why do I think this way? Here's the theoretical math:
Option 1:
Optimize keyword-driven site to rank in Google: approx 30 hours @ $50 hour labor cost (not sure what you charge for time, so using $50 as an example) = $1500Time cold-calling and email blasting potential buyers to purchase said domain: approx 8 hours = $400
Most likely cost for selling said site: approx $2000 max ($800-1500 most likely)
Gained vs Invested = $2000-1900=$100. Also this negates the fact that you can make additional money from this client again, unless you start the process over again.
Option 2:
Demonstrate SEO prowess to potential client using existing sites as proof of results
Sign up client for basic SEO services at $500 per month.
Invest 20-30 hours making client's site soar in results.
Client is happy. Refers friends and other business owners your way.
You make more money, and gain a positive reputation for being a quality seo provider.
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
-
Improving Local Pack results across other services
A company I work for ranks well in the Local Pack under its primary service offering i.e. "primary service Bristol". And also under some other services it offers. However, under other services that are offered, it doesn't show in the local pack despite ranking No 1 in the natural SERPS for the target phrase "example service Bristol". We have pages covering all main services in the main site navigation bar. Is this just the way it is or can something be done to resolve this? Does the detail in the third-party citations have a significant impact? What about the content of the reviews? I note that we are doing better under the services mentioned within the reviews. Should I add additional categories and emulating those used by the competition under the search terms? Or am I missing something else?
Local Website Optimization | | GrouchyKids0 -
Areaserved json-ld schema markup for a local business that targets national tourism
If there is a local business that thrives on ranking nationally for people searching for their services in that location, do you target the business's actual service areas or target nationally? For instance, a hotel in Denver, Colorado. Would the areaserved markup be: "areaServed":[{"@type":"State","name":"Colorado"},{"@type":"City","name":"Denver"}] Or "areaserved":"USA" The "geographic area where a service or offered item is provided" would be denver, colorado. But we would be looking to target all people nationally looking to travel to denver, colorado. Or would it be best to target it all, like: "areaServed":[{"@type":"State","name":"Colorado"},{"@type":"City","name":"Denver"},"USA"]
Local Website Optimization | | SEOdub0 -
Getting my Video SERPS Packs
I having issues fully understanding how to get the Video SERP packs. I am owner of a wedding videography company and would love to start getting the video SERPS. I am just not 100% sure how to go about this and everything I have read is not making sense. Any thoughts would be great
Local Website Optimization | | UVdesign1 -
How Google's Doorway Pages Update Affects Local SEO
Hey Awesome Local Folks! I thought I'd take a proactive stance and start a thread on the new doorway pages update from Google, as I feel there will be questions coming up about this here in the forum: Here's the update announcement: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html And here's the part that will make local business owners and Local SEOs take a second glance at this: Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages: Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic? I think this will naturally lead to questions about the practice of creating local/city landing pages. At this point, my prediction is that this will come down to high quality vs. crummy quality pages of this type. In fact, after chatting briefly with Andrew Shotland, I'm leaning a bit toward seeing the above language as being strongly geared toward directory type sites and large franchises. I recommend reading Andrew's post about his take on this, as I think he's on the right track: http://www.localseoguide.com/googles-about-to-close-your-local-doorway-pages/ So, I'm feeling at this point that if you've made the right efforts to develop unique, high quality local landing pages, you should be good unless you are an accidental casualty of an over-zealous update. We'll see! If anyone has thoughts to contribute on this thread, I hope they will, and if lots of questions start coming up about this here in the community, feel free to link back to this thread in helping your fellow community members 🙂 Thanks, all!
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis9 -
Search Result Brings Up Home Page
Hi all, I've been looking at some SEO work on our new CMS site that's been up for a few months now and when doing a search for a particular page which I know has good SEO and received a 'B' rating on the MOZ on page grader, our home page shows up and not our relevant page. I don't exactly want to worsen the SEO on our home page so that it doesn't show up, but why would my home page which is fairly generic and covers a large area of the business show up rather than the specific page which I am searching with exact keywords for? For example: If I was searching for 'bananas' my home page for fruits would show up rather than my bananas page which has been tailored around those keywords. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | HB170 -
Local Ranking Power of a Multi-Keyword URL?
Here is a site that is sitting at number 1 on Google UK (local results) for a number of its keywords: http://www.scottishdentistry.com/ If you look at the links in the navigation many of them have urls such as this: http://www.scottishdentistry.com/glasgow-scotland-dentistry/glasgow-scotland-hygienists.html These have clearly been created to be keyword rich. For example, there is no publicly-available page at: http://www.scottishdentistry.com/glasgow-scotland-dentistry Do you think this tactic has helped with the site's rankings? Is it worth imitating? Or will it ultimately attract a penalty of some kind? Remember this is in the UK where Google seems to be slower at penalising dodgy tactics than in the US. Thanks everyone.
Local Website Optimization | | neilmac0 -
Can anyone recommend small UK based SEO Consultancy companies?
Hi there, We're possibly looking for a small, completely whitehat SEO firm here in the UK to work with us from early next year. We've probably got a budget of around £200 - £300 a month. We're looking for top up work really, not a complete campaign. I've checked out http://moz.com/community/recommended but it's not broken down by region or budget. I had an embarrassing phone call with Distilled who it turns out charge £10,000 a month minimum! Can anyone recommend anyone to speak to?
Local Website Optimization | | jennie.evans0 -
2 Relevant local websites but closing one and redirecting it to an older site
We have 2 websites, 1 domain is about 10 years old and another is about 4 years old, the 4 yr old domain we are thinking of shutting down since its the same type of service we run but it was a 'keyword domain' that used to rank on 1st page but now its 4th page back. If we put the blog posts and other content + setup re-directs from the 4yr old domain to the 10 yr old domain, would this help the 10 yr old domain with more link juice that it might need for the extra boost? There isnt really any point having both websites up since both are about the same content and targeting the same local market.
Local Website Optimization | | surfsup0