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
-
How to Evaluate Original Domain Authority vs. Recent 'HTTPS' Duplicate for Potential Domain Migration?
Hello Everyone, So our site has used ‘http’ for the domain since the start. Everything has been set up for this structure and Google is only indexing these pages. Just recently a second version was created on ‘httpS’. We know having both up is the worst case scenario but now that both are up is it worth just switching over or would the original domain authority warrant just keeping it on ‘http’ and redirecting the ‘httpS’ version? Assuming speed and other elements wouldn’t be an issue and it's done correctly. Our thought was if we could do this quickly it would be easier to just redirect the ‘httpS’ version but was not sure if the Pros of ‘httpS’ would be worth the resources. Any help or insight would be appreciated. Please let us know if there are any further details we could provide that might help. Looking forward to hearing from all of you! Thank you in advance for the help. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R1 -
Domain switch planned - new domain accessible - until the switch: redirect from new to old domain with 307?
Hi there, We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November. As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now. I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already. My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com? Do you have any objections or other recommendations? Thank you a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | comicron0 -
Should I redirect my Google Update Effected Domain to brand new Domain?
Hey Moz experts, I had a domain which was really doing better but after the Humming Bird update my traffic was decreased up to 90%. There are plenty of posts on my existing blog, Now what should I do? I mean should I redirect it to a brand new domain or Copy all the posts to a brand new domain and delete my existing domain? Note that the Old domain has PR1, DA 19 and PA 30.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imran20780 -
Help understanding 301 domain redirect
Can anyone help me understand a specific process of a 301 redirecting a domain. Here is what I would like to know.... When you 301 redirect a site, most if not all the links follow to your new site. But how does this process happen? 1.When Google sees the new domain does it simply apply the backlink profile of the old site to the new one? 2. Does it have to re-crawl all the links one by one and apply them to the new domain? 3. or something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Moving categories to new domain
Hello Mozzers , I'm trying to find best possible solution for this situation. So there is a website (e-commerce) and since it's grew up too much we are looking to move several categories on different domain. The reason for this is that we introduce completely different product group (example: we have products that are related to watches and everything related to watch industry but now we introduce leather products: wallets, bags etc). Do you think it is worth it to move new categories to new domain in order to better target this product group? In case of positive answer which is the best way to do it - 301 redirect or leave the products on this site and build a new site with slightly different product description and names? Regards, Nenad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Uniline0 -
Help! My Domain Authority keeps dropping! What do I do?
Hey! I just noticed my Domain Authority keeps dropping? What's happening? What do I do to get it better. I'm scared and dont know the next move to make to get this site better. Help please! Thanks! http://www.moondoggieinc.com Kristy O
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristyO1 -
Is my other domain making me not rank?
Hi there, We have a .co.uk website which was ranking well for a number of highly competitive keywords, however in February 2012 those rankings for those keywords suddenly dropped off Google all together and have never came back. A few possibilties to why this has happened: We launched a .ie website which has exactly the same content, could this be the reason for the drop? I have put in all the necessary steps in making sure Google ranks these geographically correct by using hreflang and making sure everything is setup properly in webmaster tools. Why I think it could be this: If I copy and paste the first few paragraphs of text from the pages in the .co.uk website that were ranked highly in Google.co.uk it's the .ie version that appears not the .co.uk version. Here is the webpages in question: http://www.avogel.co.uk/health/menopause/ http://www.avogel.ie/health/menopause/ Forgot to mention, the reason we have these two websites is due to different currency and legalities. Hope someone can help me out with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
What would be the best domain choice?
Hello I got a website www.keywordCA.com and I'm ranking #1 spot on "keyword" but what I notice if you have the exact match you get more site links and etc. Like this keyword that match with my domain name "keyword CA" The ideal name will be www.keyword.com but is taken and the owner don't want to sell the domain (at least he is not using it, is just parked) and I also got the domain www.keyword.net Do you think www.keyword.net will be much better than KeywordCA.com in order to get more exposure and google will generate more site links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpgprinting0