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
-
Descriptive domain vs business name domain
I originally set up my domain as "overlandparkphotographer.com" and then have my "jpshots.com" pointing to it. What I recently discovered is that even though the pages of my I set Yost SEO Title to be "JPShots Senior Pictures | Wedding Photographer" When you search "overland park photographer" the snippet tile is just "overland park photographer" which sounds super sketchy. I don't know if this is something to do with yost, or if my sneaky Domain isn't worth much, and I should simply use my regular jpshots.com domain as the primary. I know it works like a charm with yahoo, but I'm not sure how much the domain name factors google these days.
Algorithm Updates | | JPRichardson0 -
Do the referring domains matter a lot in back-links? Google's stand?
Hi, It's a known fact about quality of back-links than quantity. Still domains are heavily different from links. Multiple domains are huge comparing to multiple links. Taking an average, how much does 'number of referring domains" boost website authority? I am not speaking about low quality domains, just number of domains including which are irrelevant to the topic or industry. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How long for google to de-index old pages on my site?
I launched my redesigned website 4 days ago. I submitted a new site map, as well as submitted it to index in search console (google webmasters). I see that when I google my site, My new open graph settings are coming up correct. Still, a lot of my old site pages are definitely still indexed within google. How long will it take for google to drop off or "de-index" my old pages? Due to the way I restructured my website, a lot of the items are no longer available on my site. This is on purpose. I'm a graphic designer, and with the new change, I removed many old portfolio items, as well as any references to web design since I will no longer offering that service. My site is the following:
Algorithm Updates | | rubennunez
http://studio35design.com0 -
Google has indexed some of our old posts. What took so long and will we lose rank for their brevity?
Hi, We just had a few of our old blog posts indexed by Google. There are short formed posts, and I want to make sure we're not going to get dinged by Google for their length. Can you advise?https://www.policygenius.com/blog/guaranteed-issue
Algorithm Updates | | francoisdelame0 -
Complete website redesign: original domain vs subdomain vs new domain ?
Hello dear community fellas!
Algorithm Updates | | PayPro
The story goes like this: my company has a good ol' website launched back in 2008 and since then nothing much was updated there. Our rank dropped significantly because, well, barely any SEO was done for it. Me and my team decided to redesign the whole thing: content, structure, visuals, links, everything but this time really making it right. However, with our oldie we managed to get a nice user base, so we still want to get all the traffic juice out of it. Now the questions is where do you think is the best place to publish our new website: Our original domain www.companyname.com? Create a subdomain new.companyname.com? Totally new domain www.namecompany.com? Cheers!0 -
Is having an identical title, h1 and url considered "over optimization"? Is it better to vary?
To get some new pages out without over-thinking things, I decided to line up the title tag, h1 tag and URLs of my pages exactly. They are dynamically generated based on the content the user is viewing (internal search results pages) They're not ranking very well at the moment, but there are a number of factors that are likely to blame. But, in particular, does anyone know if varying the text in these elements tends to perform better vs. having them all identical? Has there been any information from Google about this? Most if not all of the "over optimization" content I have seen online pertains to backlinks, not on-page content. It's easy to say, "test it!" And of course, that's just what I'm planning to do. But I thought I would leverage the combined knowledge of this forum to see what information I could obtain first, so I can do some informed testing, as tests can take a while to see results. Thanks 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | ntcma0 -
Is it allowed to put a word in all domains URLs to get higher in SERP?
Hello, What good or bad could happen if someone put the same keyword in all site's URL's? (i.e. I would be selling cars and my domain isn't included any word cars, so i put all of my pages in one folder like domain.com/cheap-cars/etc)
Algorithm Updates | | komeksimas0 -
How does an exact match domain.me rate for SEO
Anyone have any idea how an exactly matching keyword (using the "domain.me" register) will compare against an almost matching keyword in the Google .ie search engine. (assuming that on and off page SEO will be the same). eg, www.wigets.me against www.mywigets.ie Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | peterds2