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 -
Responsive websites rank better?
In the upcoming months, or even now, do you think responsive websites will rank higher?
Algorithm Updates | | CFSSEO0 -
Meta Description / Meta Keywords
So, I am using Wordpress and the seo by yoast..... I have heard that meta keywords and descriptions are no longer recognized or used by search engines with respect to page rankings in the serps. Is this true? If so, why do people still recommend using these? I thought content is king these days?
Algorithm Updates | | APICDA0 -
Ecommerce good/bad? Showing product description on sub/category page?
Hi Mozers, I have a ecommerce furniture website, and I have been wondering for some time if showing the product descriptions on the sub/category page helps the website. If there is more content displayed on the subcategory, it should be more relevant, right? OR does it not matter, as it is duplicate content from the product page. I think showing the product descriptions on non-product pages is hurting my design/flow, but i worry that if I am to hide product content on sub/category pages my traffic will be hurt. Despite my searches I have not found an answer yet. Please take a look at my site and share your thoughts: http://www.ecustomfinishes.com/ Chris 27eVz
Algorithm Updates | | longdenc_gmail.com0 -
Clients asks: How long till on Bing and Yahoo?
Hi there, One of my clients had asked me how long it would take for his site to get up on Yahoo and Bing. He's currently on Google, but those other search engines are lagging. It's been a week or so since his site launched, but I'm not sure what to tell him as I don't really know much about Yahoo and Bing.
Algorithm Updates | | StephBertha0 -
Are we penalized if our meta description is longer than 150-160 characters?
I've read on other SEO sites that description can be 350 characters or 60 words long. Some of my descriptions are a little bit over those numbers. Will Search Engines stop crawling through the description at after a certain amount of characters, or will it completely ignore it if it's too long, hence hurting my site's SEO performance?
Algorithm Updates | | jmbuytaert0 -
Title of home page is changed to domain name in SERPs
Hi, We have a unique problem, we are getting a totally different title in Google serps for a large site. When we search with domain name with space in google.com. We are getting title as domain name with space. We don't have any Open Directory listing. We don't have any cannonical issues and other pages with title as domain name. Can you please tell us what we have to do get our original title back in SERP ? Thanks, With Regards,
Algorithm Updates | | semshah1430 -
Why google index ip address instead of the domain name?
I have a website ,now google index ip address of it instead of the domain name,I have used 301 redirected to the domain name,but how to change the index IP to its domain name? And why google index the IP address?
Algorithm Updates | | frankfans1170