Client hell bent on grabbing a competitive .net domain
-
Hi all,
Firstly, i'm a content guy! Thrown into SEO at the deep end, but absolutley loving it and the community.
I need some advice, so i'm popping my cherry with this one:
I have a client who is in the service industry, very competitive and in a City, so it's all local. He has branded site that has had little investment in SEO and a huge PPC spend over the years. After a lot of nagging they are getting the message that PPC is a massive money tap and as soon as it's turned off that's it - gone!
They have had conversations and hit me up with this as their want.
Example: They see www.londoncakebakers.com / .co.uk which is a site belonging to Smiths Cakes.
They have spotted that www.londoncakebakers.net is free to purchase! You know what's coming right?
They want to buy it, get me to design a site for it and deploy SEO on it in a big way! The key phrases are all in the domain name and all the obvious benefits. Am I over thinking this and should embrace it, or should I advise, no, no, no?
Thanks in advance.
Mark
-
Thanks Keri,
Yes the domains I gave were examples not the real domains, to demonstrate a service industry.
That was in my thinking, however, as it's a service and that service being "cake baking in London" and not www.smithscakes.com and my client buying "www.smithscakes.net, i was a tad unsure but after some research i "think" that should be fine as there are no TM infringements. Also the .com owner leads the visitor not by saying welcome to "domain name" but welcome to "brand name".
So they would be competing on service not brand.
Hope that helps shed a bit more light on it for you. Lesson there to structure my inital post with more meat on the bones.
Thanks
Mark
-
I don't know if these are sample or actual domains, but also consider if there is a chance of any legal implications of choosing a similar domain -- for example if you tried to register google.co and put up a search engine, Google would have issues with that.
-
Still reading and blown away with the speed and quality of advice, it's excellent and I can see the talent pool is worth keeping in touch with. I hope I can help you guys out with content or design related questions sometime.
Thanks again
Mark
-
You two flatter me greatly.
I can honestly say that I learnt from the best community and the best within the community, present company included.
Mark, if you're still reading at this point, you'd do very well to heed advice from these two, plus so so many others in this community. Enjoy your time here!
-
Yes, I am starting to read any of his posts that I see.
-
Tom,
This was a very, very good explanation. Thanks
-
Thanks for that.
They are quite realistic really and know it will bring fewer clicks but more targeted visits based on the theory of EMD vs Searchers queries. I was really not too sure of the value of the .net myself so thanks for that.
More food for thought
Cheers
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the really good reply there. It's very much an echo of my gut feeling.
I think i'm going to plump for, picking up the domain name, creating the clients site, putting 80% of SEO efforts into the branded site and the other 20% at keeping the exact match on the go as almost a side project, as they will hoover up some clicks based on the search term.
Thanks again for the welcome and the advice, it's much appreciated.
Mark
-
Hi Mark,
It's not a big deal, more work if anything.
But I don't believe that .net EMD will bring any exact match boost, only the .co.uk and .com will really give you that (I have done some work with EMD's and that's what I have found).
I suppose the only thing to worry about is if it takes a little longer to rank because it's fresh, im guessing they want the EMD because they think it will have some sort of magical powers to jump to page 1?
-
Hi Mark
Welcome to the community mate!
My advice would be to be purchase the domain if they insist, but focus all of your SEO and marketing efforts on their branded website. And here's why:
Two things were apparent in 2012. First, Google were targeting low quality Exact Match Domains (EMD), which the one you mentioned above would be initially They released an EMD update that you can read about here.
That's not to say that EMDs do not work if they are a quality website - they absolutely can. But the playing field, as it were, has become a lot more level, so if you have two sites with identical "strength", but one has a branded URL and one an exact match URL, Google is really working towards making the EMD not have an advantage over the other - and I'd say they're very nearly there.
Now, you could invest your SEO and search marketing on the new domain and make it an 'authority' site, but I would much rather stick with using the brand URL. Another thing that was apparent in 2012 with all of the updates that were released, particularly Penguin, is that Google is starting to favour brands and authority websites that come with it.
From a marketing perspective in general, I'd also advise your team to stick with a branded URL. The entire digital marketing scene is coming much more in line with normal marketing practices (mainly down to digital marketing now becoming the primary marketing channel of them all) and Google is certainly trying to reflect this when it comes to SEO. If you have a branded URL you're always promoting brand awareness, you can build on your name and reputation online and there's no mistaking your identity.
Deploy your SEO to the branded URL. It might be worth picking up the URL anyway and see if there's something you can do with it in the future (maybe your company could host a London-wide competition for bakers and market it under that URL, for example), domains are relatively cheap now anyway.
Hope this helps and welcome aboard once again!
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
-
Legacy domains
Hi all, A couple of years ago we amalgamated five separate domains into one, and set up 301 redirects from all the pages on the old domains to their equivalent pages on the new site. We were a bit tardy in using the "change of address" tool in Search Console, but that was done nearly 8 months ago now as well. Two years after implementing all the redirects, the old domains still have significant authority (DAs of between 20-35) and some strong inbound links. I expected to see the DA of the legacy domains taper off during this period and (hopefully!) the DA of the new domain increase. The latter has happened, although not as much as I'd hoped, but the DA of the legacy domains is more or less as good as it ever was? Google is still indexing a handful of links from the legacy sites, strangely even when it is picking up the redirects correctly. So, for example, if you do a site:legacydomain1.com query, it will give a list of results which includes pages where it shows the title and snippet of the page on newdomain.com, but the link is to the page on legacydomain1.com. What has prompted me to finally try and resolve this is that the server which hosted the original 5 domains is now due to be decommissioned which obviously means the 301 redirects for the original pages will no longer be served. I can set up web forwarding for each of the legacy domains at the hosting level, but to maintain the page-by-page redirects I'd have to actually host the websites somewhere. I'd like to know the best way forward both in terms of the redirect issue, and also in terms of the indexing of the legacy domains? Many thanks, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarkovitch0 -
Is .ME domain is effective in SEO ?
I am always listening about TLD. com. org .net but what about the .me domain. Can this will be effective in SEO. Can i able to beat down my competitors, if i choose .me . I also have a .com or other TLD option but if i am making my name than .me is for me but i need your suggestion for the seo purpose. Is there really domain affective in term of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pnb5670 -
Credit Links on Client Websites
I know there have been several people who have asked this but a lot of them were back in 2012 before many of the google changes. My question is the same though. With all the changes with Google's algorithm. Is it okay to put your link on the bottom of your clients website. Like Web Design by, etc. Part of the reason is to drive traffic but also if someone is actually interested who designed the website, they will click it. But now reading about how bad links can hurt you tremendously, it makes me second guess if this is ok. My gut feeling says, no.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blackrino0 -
Best domain extension is .com or .net for SEO ?
Best domain extension is .com or .net for SEO ? I wanna make site ,in that business directory ,travel guides , Hotels many more . I wanna target a one kw local search about 1,000,000 per month .domain name ofthat keyword already has taken by some one but .net remaining plz advice me to proceed .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
301 Redirecting multiple domains to brand new domain
Hi guys, I have read quite a bit of stuff on 301 redirects after Penguin. Hoping someone could help me out. im looking at a way to do a legit 301 redirect without passing the penalty. I have acquired two businesses, business1 and business2, that both had websites that were hit by penguin. Ive anaylsed there backlinks and theres a lot of spammy forum links and comments and I was also informed they were both using buildmyrank. A side note, buiness2 only started using BMR after it noticed business1 have large amounts of high PR links. business1.com was ranking at position 1 till the penguin hit. Business2.com was ranking around page 2 I work in the same arena as these two businesses and didnt generate any business via the internet. When these 2 businesses failed (due to loss of rankings and traffic) i decided to take them over. What I am thinking of doing is 301'ing both business domains to my brand new, zero links, domain which will be the name of my new company. I will combine the content from both sites, around 1000 pages, in to the new one. So my question is, does 301'ing multiple domains, that target the same keywords, and operate in the same niche, look less "spammy" then 301'ing 1 domain? I'm trying to look at it in the eyes of google. It is a legit merging of businesses. Thanks for your help, really appreciate your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Best linking practice for international domains
SEOMoz team, I am wondering that in the days of Panda and Penguin SEOs have an opinion on how to best link between international domains for a web page property. Let's say you have brandname.DE (German site) brandname.FR (French site) brandname.CO.UK (British site) Right now we are linking form each site on the page to the other two language sites to make users aware of the translated version of the site which obviously make it a site wide link which seems to be lately disencouraged by Google. Did anyone out there have any ideas how to strategically interlink between international domains that represent language versions of a web site? /PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro0 -
How do i redirect www.domain.com/ to www.domain.com/index.php
I keep getting in my analytics www.domain.com/ and www.domain.com/index.php how do i make it consistently redirect to one version and not to both. I know about htaccess redirect and am already using this so am puzzle to which is the best one to use. below is the example .htaccess file im using. Options +FollowSymlinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattmillen
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.co.uk [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/index.php$1 [r=301,nc] which is better for SEO should i forward to www.domain.com/ or www.domain.com/index.php0 -
Improve Domain Trust
Hey there, I need to improve the Domain trust of my website. I've seen the blogitems of Rand but I still have questions. If I want to increase the Domain Trust..I "simpely" have to get links from websites with a high Domain Trust. This will eventually improve my Domain trust. But what are the effects if I do this by reciprocal linking. Does this eliminates the trust that comes from the other website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PlusPort1