Affects of vanity domains?
-
Hi there! My client's domain name is his name, let's say (www,myname.com) because he is well-known in his industry. He is a physician with a very specific specialty and organic competition is fierce for the most relevant keyword to his specialty. A domain has just become available that includes the keyword. If we bought the domain, how could we use it to our advantage? I'm confused about redirecting, etc., with this type of situation. Am i making any sense here? Help! Thanks.
-
If your client is well know in it's industry, it might be a good idea to use his vanity domain since that may be what people are looking for, his name working as a Brand.
But I would also buy this other domain you are talking about and create another content more closely related to the term in the domain and related.
This way you would have people looking for this specialist + those looking for the products. Just don't put the same thing on both one.
Normally when I explain that to a client, they do understand pretty fast that using both the Brand + the product brings a broader volume of targeted traffic then one or another.
Off course it his more job in term on Backlinking and Content writing, but sometime you have to take more time to do a better job.
-
the question is what's your long term strategy.
This is a very good point. If the doctor plans to have an extended practice then a website other than his personal name could be better long term. Of course his personal site could always be redirected if needed.
-
IMO this is sort of like a Brand vs Non-Brand discussion.
Let's say you are Colgate. And your website is Toothpaste.com
The question would be whether people would search you using Colgate or Toothpaste.
I understand and imagine the dilemma you are in as to how to utilize the domain. I would also consider creating a blog on the physicians name if you think content can be created around it. as EGOL and other's have recommended, the question is what's your long term strategy. What keywords do you target in your existing domain etc.
-
I guess it depends how well know he is. You can use Keyword Tool to check how popular he is vs the mentioned keyword. Is he well known just among other physicians or a broader audience of potential customers? How likely is your potential customer to search for his name?
-
he is well-known in his industry
This could be an advantages that is far more powerful than a domain.
I would use it over a domain "that includes the keyword"
-
you would stop someone else using it, that is one advanatge.
a extact match domain will help you rank for that keyword only, but if the keyword is very compeditive, then you going to need more then just a EM domain, remeber that you need to get links for the main domain, so you dont want to be trying to get links for both.
doing 301 redirect will not give you any rank. unless there are links pointing to it, but if domain has changed owners, there is doubt if those links still hold the sdame value.
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
-
Will using CDN Affect SEO?
I'm got a website with a slider and each of the 6 slides has a 5-second video background. The website is B2B and the user profile for the website is employees at Fortune 1000 companies in the United States using desktop computers to browse. The videos are highly optimized and we did testing using various browsers and bandwidth connections to determine the videos loaded fast enough on down to a 15mbit/s connection (which is pretty low by today's average U.S. business bandwidths.) We tried hosting the videos on Vimeo and YouTube but it caused issues in the timing of the slide show display. (I've not seen any other website do what we do the way we do it. Most sites have a single video background with a single text overlay on top.) The downside to this is that loading all those videos produces a lot of bandwidth usage for our server. The website is serving a niche service industry though so we're not exceeding our current limits. I'm wondering though might there be some benefit to hosting just the video files on a CDN? Obviously that would mean lest bandwidth usage for our server, and possibly quicker load times where the CDN server is closer to the user than our server. But are there benefits or downsides from an SEO perspective noting that I'm proposing only putting the videos on the CDN, not the entire web page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Consult19010 -
How best to handle partial domain move?
The scenario is this, we have a website eg: ABC.com where the content is in two language folders (en-us and en-gb). We have created a new brand with website XYZ.com for the USA market. Of course, this domain will take a while to rank because it is completely fresh. My question is how best to deactivate the en-us content on the old site to: a) prevent it showing up on Google US
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esseljay
and
b) pass the US traffic to the new website to boost its rankings I was thinking of removing the en-us pages from ABC.com and using a 410 error page containing a link to XYZ.com
Would it be better to replace the content on en-us instead (with a link)? I'm not keen to use a straight 301 redirect as sometimes we get traffic from other countries to the en-us content. Thanks in advance Mozzers 🙂0 -
Translated Content on Country Domains
Hi, We have blogs set up in each of our markets, for example http://blog.telefleurs.fr, http://blog.euroflorist.nl and http://blog.euroflorist.be/nl. Each blog is localized correctly so FR has fr-FR, NL has nl-NL and BE has nl-BE and fr-BE. All our content is created or translated by our Content Managers. The question is - is it safe for us to use a piece of content on Telefleurs.fr and the French translated Euroflorist.be/fr, or Dutch content on Euroflorist.nl and Euroflorist.be/nl? We want to avoid canonicalising as neither site will take preference. Is there a solution I've missed until now? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoeuroflorist
Sam0 -
Guidelines for a second website business domain
Hi There, A client is setting up a second website selling the same products from a separate domain with the same descriptions etc. The site will have a separate URL, but will administered from the same CMS. The only difference is the new site has only one brand instead of several on the main site. E.G The main site sells all plumbing brands, the second site just one brand. Your thoughts and advice for best practise would be much appreciated. Andy (Marz Ventures)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarzVentures0 -
Should I Forward Niche Site To Main Domain?
I have a niche site that was hit by penguin. I was never hit with a manual penalty, but it is obvious the algo update hit the site. I have submitted a disavow file, but it doesn't seem to have made an impact. The site does have good rankings on Yahoo and Bing. Should I close this site and 301 to the category page on my main site (i.e tshirts.com forwarded to mainsite.com/tshirts.html)? The main site had a drop after penguin, but is now receiving more traffic than pre-Penguin. The impact is mainly keyword specific (i.e keywords that appeared in anchor text dropped). Appreciate thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Community inside the domain or in a separate domain
Hi there, I work for an ecommerce company as an online marketing consultant. They make kitchenware, microware and so on. The are reviewing their overall strategy and as such they want to build up a community. Ideally, they would want to have the community in a separate domain. This domain wouldn't have the logo of the brand. This community wouldn't promote the brand itself. The brand would post content occassionally and link the store domain. The reasoning of this approach is to not interfere in the way of the community users and also the fact that the branded traffic acquired doesn't end up buying at the store I like this approach but I am concerned because the brand is not that big to have two domains separated and lose all the authority associated with one strong domain. I would definitely have everything under the same domain, store and community, otherwise we would have to acquire traffic for two domains. 1. What do you think of both scenarios, one domain versus two? Which one is better? 2. Do you know any examples of ecommerce companies with successful communities within the store domain? Thanks and regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footd0 -
Is it worth buying a GREAT domain with rank?
Hey Guys, I am in communication with the owner of a domain with very good domain rank - that ranks well for keywords important to me. Strangely enough the website it terrible?! (I though Google valued "content" these days?!). Anyhow, it's link profile is tidy including sites such as DMOZ. His asking price for the domain is SUBSTANTIAL, however where it ranks for some keywords would be valuable for our organisation if we could leverage its authority. My questions are: 1) Is it worth buys a GREAT domain with a crappy website that ranks for keywords that are important to us? 2) (if the answer to 1 is YES) How should one go about leveraging the rank to benefit our site/business? 3) What would be the best way to utilise the site - redirects? Build out some kind of content and link to main site? Anyhow, hopefully some of you have great experience in this domain in the current Google Panda/Penguin white hat world? Would REALLY appreciate your thoughts!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | love-seo-goodness1 -
.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