My Domain Name - short vs relevant
-
I'm creating a website for my new web design company in Vancouver. I'm looking to target such keywords as "Web Design Vancouver", etc.
I have another company with a hyphenated domain name which is terrible when I'm on the phone and my client asks me for my domain (hard to say, always spelling it out).
Also I wanted to have a good snappy name for my new business so I found a 6 letter .com and matching .ca for my company.
My question is: is it best to use a short domain name or is it better have my keywords in the domain name?
eg. xyz.com vs xyzvancouverwebdesign.com
Thanks
-
Thank you for your quick responses. I'm not going to purchase other domains such as xyzwebdesign.com as I'm only going to be SEOing one domain, in particular it will be xyz.ca, I do however own xyz.com and xyz.net and will 301 redirect those to the .ca.
Because I'm a company in Canada I figure I should optimize my .ca, and make that my main domain and not my .com.
-
What about getting both domain names anyway? I always thought it is good practice to buy the related domain names so the competition can't get them? You would redirect/point the longer name and the hyphenated names to the shorter one. I'm not sure of any seo benefits except the competition doesn't benefit from your name.
-
That is what I was gonna suggest too. In general I favor short domains, even though bookmarking has come so far in the past 10 years. Everyone bookmarks everything these days, so you don't need to worry as much about spelling and remembering a long name. With that said I still like the short domains.
Branding will be a big part with the shorter, new domain name. You can make up for the lack of keywords in the domain name with some quality content and strong, local links.
-
If you can get a really good relevant domain then go with that, but a hyphenated domain is not really good. I personally have found that I would rather go with short and easy, given the absence of good keyword domains.
SEO can't be my only strategy, especially for a new site, so being able to tell people about my site verbally and them find it easily is more important to me.
-
I agree, get a great domain name that is short & user friendly and concentrate on building the brand. You can still SEO the site and as Elias mentioned, any benefit of exact match domains is being slowly chipped away so concentrate on your users.
I wish I had known what I know now when I registered my company and domain name!
-
Hi Jonathan,
This is difficult....You have to balance the benefits for the visitors and the search engines.
Although, having relevant domain names still works for gaining good rankings it is not as powerful as it once was. It may eventually not be part of Google's algorithm at all with future updates.
Due to that fact alone I would go with the short name and concentrate on targeting Vancouver web design on-page and with links. I think this would help to future-proof your website and would be more user friendly.
On a side note - I would avoid hyphenated domain names as it is widely believed that Google uses this as a spam indicator.
I hope this helps!
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
-
International website - Image names
Hello All! In an international website, it is recommended to have a copy of every image for every language in the website (with translate filenames)? or it is better to use only one copy of each image and change only the alt attributes? Thanks for the help.
On-Page Optimization | | dMaLasp0 -
Redirect www.domain to domain
How do I redirect www.entrepreneurhandbook.co.uk to entrepreneurhandbook.co.uk The latter is an existing site. Thanks James
On-Page Optimization | | entrepreneurhandbook1 -
Internal keyword linking - short or long string
I've seen a couple of people leave comments about keyword linking being too specific. If I"m doing a lot of internal keyword linking and I want to rank well for 'widgets', is it better that most of the links just use the word 'widgets' or should some of the links have more words in them. ie: 'red and blue widgets' - 'buy these widgets online' etc.
On-Page Optimization | | sparrowdog0 -
Rebranding and Domain Name Changes
Hi All, One of my clients wants to rebrand http://indiaretailnews.com/ so that it's clear that the site is under the operational umbrella of http://tradebriefs.com/. indiaretailnews.com has a lower domain authority of 20, but because of the domain name it ranks number #2 for the keyword "retail news" for Google India. The client's question: Can we change the site names to TradeBriefsRetail.com orTradeBriefsIndiaRetail.com without affecting the SEO on each site? How do we do this – redirect from TradeBriefsIndiaRetail.com to IndiaRetailNews.com and so on or simply put all the content on the new sites and get rid of the old domains or some other way? Do long domain names cause a problem? Another option is TradeBriefsRetail.in, etc with the domain extension showing the country that the content is for.. In a year or two, we will be expanding to markets outside India. My opinion: Keep the old domains and redirect to something like http://tradebriefs.com/india-retail-news Or perhaps a subdomain: http://indiaretailnews.tradebriefs.com In the short term, I'd imagine rankings will drop, but if we wanted to consolidate domain authority, I was thinking that http://tradebriefs.com/india-retail-news would be the best bet. Thoughts? Kenji
On-Page Optimization | | KenjiCrosland0 -
Slash vs no slash?
Why does SeoMoz tell me I have duplicate content issues and show me these two URLs? mysite.com mysite.com/ What does the slash matter and why is that considered duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | shawn810 -
5 websites, 1 root domain name: good or bad?
Hi guys, I'm new here, so this might be a basic question to the experts here! So here is my situation: I have 1 "umbrella" website (root domain name) that contains 4 different websites, for a total of 5 different websites. They are related, but we needed to brand each website differently to fit each strategy. Q: I have 23 domain names.. this means I have 23 sub-domain names?
On-Page Optimization | | Jacky_C
Q: Is this practice good or bad for my SEO?
Q: should I analyze each domain name/SD? Here are my 5 websites
RD: furisgreen.com
SD1: furcouncil.com
SD2: furfashions.com
SD3: naffem.com
SD4: beautifullycanadian.com Thank you for your help!!0 -
Different names for Twitter/Facebook, and site?
Greetings, I want to optimize my site, www.atstrust.com. I know that posts to Facebook and Twitter help improve ranks. Does it matter though if my twitter/facebook sites have a different name than the domain I am optimizing? For example, my Facebook site is facebook.com/easyinspection. I assume that doesn't matter as long as the URLs on the site refer to my domain? Thanks! Eric
On-Page Optimization | | Ericc220 -
Domain authority
Wondering why my domain authority has dropped after about three months of trying to implement the best practices suggested on this site. Can anyone help?
On-Page Optimization | | MauiCoffee0