Changing domain name, witch is better - brand name.com vs keyword + brand name.com?
-
Hi,
I just made one decision and now I'm bit worried, if I did right one. I hope that you can give me feedback and advice regarding it. I'm in hookah market, so I do not have any possibilities to buy adds, so SEO is really-really important to us. I know a lot of things what has to be done to perform better, but currently I have just few really important questions. In international market the main keyword is "hookah" and everything related to that. We are small company and our brand is not that well known and do not have high volume traffic on website. Hookah in front of that we tough will give better understanding to audience about what is the page.
Which domain name is better for SEO and also branding purposes? Currently we were using the first one without keyword, no we switched to the second one (just about week ago).
Regarding it, some really important questions:
-
Would the longer version of domain helps us better rank with important keywords to us or not?
-
When we will write good content, which domain is more likely shared? I'm bit afraid that first one and that we made a mistake changing the domain name. When the 1st one, then how big difference does it potentially make?
Thank you
-
-
Can I also note that I don't think you've made enough of the benefits of this thing. 'Features' is great but that's more B2B, benefits is B2C. People want to feel liberated and you've done this great with your imagery but the copy and words perhaps need more depth to them.
Put more copy on the site. I know it looks beautiful and you don't want to interfere with the design but copy sells not images. It doesn't have to be long but explain the benefits and problems that you're solving right at the beginning.
-
I've just done some more research here. So Hekkpipe is your brand? And you're worried that people might not know that means it's a portable (and epic by the way) sort of 'picnic / skatepark / on the go hookah'. But also you presumably don't want people thinking it's an ecig!
OK so now I understand a bit better I would certainly have Hookah in the name of the brand. Not for google for people. If you'd said right at the get-go My site 'portablehookah.com' or 'picnichookah.com' wants to do x, y and z then I'd instantly have known what it was all about.
Also - and very interestingly - I'm a dentist and have never had a dedicated page for 'Smile Makeovers' because it's broad and competes with all the elements of a smile makeover like implants and dental stuff. But we've always ranked for 'smile makeover' because our URL is 'Smileworks' Also "The Brace Place" was really hard to beat to the number one spot for 'Braces' but we did do it eventually. So i'd say you're perhaps trying to solve the wrong problem here.
Unless you are going to do multinational advertising so that the whole world knows that Hekkpipe means 'Portable Hookah' then i'd put it somewhere in there so people know what they are looking for and looking at. It's a great idea and a beautiful website but I literally wasn't sure what it was from any of your URL examples. SO why not spell it out for the masses. People are not that smart and especially in my niche we have to spell out lots of stuff that is not always the most elegant and 'cool' but it gets the job done and people understand and when they understand they buy.
Like I'd want one of these now - if I hadn't given up my ecig in favour of gum. Think about expressing your brand in terms of what you are for and also what you are against. Sometimes it's useful to say what you are not so people can better understand what you are. Does that make sense? So you are for smoking and activities and healthy outdoorsy stuff and parties and being cool. What you are not is a whole load of things that you need to spell out to the potential buyers - who maybe hookah users or ecig users or just people who like cool stuff or they may be outdoorsy types or super-cool social types.
-
Thank you Ed for a nice and good answer. Hekkpipe is not pushing locally, we would like to become international brand. This is good feedback that hookahhekkpipe.com doesn't sound good. When we aim to become also important player in out niche, is then better option for example to keep turn back to hekkpipe.com or should it be hekkpipehookah.com (on SEO purpose and clearness what is Hekkpipe)? On brand wise it seems to me that it is easier to brand hekkpipe.com.
In local business perspective it is really good information, how to gain a change to rank higher.
-
Th number one result here in the UK for Hookah is Hookah-Shisha.com. They've been clever by adding in both names. I'm a local brand so we are 'Smileworks Liverpool' because I want to pick up local Liverpool search. But If I changed my name to SmileworksDentistLiverpool I'm more likely to get a penalty than a bump in search.
There have been updates going on at google back in 2015 and then recently making the title of the business containing the name of what you're selling less important and presumably in the future this is going to increase to fight spam.
It's a local thing though. So if you set up a local business and call it Braces Liverpool or HookahLiverpool then you can get a quick win in the maps but it'll soon be filtered out.
So be natural and make the name of your brand descriptive but not stuffed with keywords. I would imagine that Hookah-shisha is a really great site with strong implicit user feedback and time on site and low bounce rate that answers users questions about how to buy, use and the issues surrounding Shisha and Hookah.
I'll also bet it was created before this algorithm tweak. To me HookahHekpipe.com does sound slightly 'unnatural' so I'd have avoided it but am sure it's not going to make only a small amount of difference when compared with the quality of your content, UX, implicit user feedback and your link profile. I'm seeing a trend towards google not 'punishing' so much rather they just 'ignore' and don't give you any extra love for adding the odd slightly unnatural sounding keyword in there. HekpipeHookah sounds more natural. Like a company here in Liverpool called 'The Liverpool Brace Place' or 'City Dental' which have the keyword in there but it's 'natural' sounding.
Everything you do now needs to be natural and done for the users and not the search engines. There are still basic must haves but even these are becoming less and less important as time goes on.
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
-
Standardising of Company Name Across The Web Question
Good Morning All There are two variations of our company name on the website. Sometimes the name is listed as "name and name" and sometimes listed as "name & name" The domain is obviously www.nameandname.co.uk I believe I am correct in saying that we would be wise to go through and standardise, using one form or the other? Secondly, my main question is would we be wise to use "name and name" as the default, as the word "and" and not the symbol "&" is in the domain itself? Many Thanks
Branding | | ruislip180 -
Re-Branding Website
Hi everyone! I'm currently in the process of re-branding a website, and am really worried about the SEO consequences of doing so... The site I'm working on has recently been seeing a large increase of organic search traffic (almost 25% each month for the past 3 months) and I want to do my best to avoid screwing that up in the process of changing the aesthetic of the site. A couple specific questions I have are: Does changing the stylesheet, but none of the on-page content affect SEO? Would condensing menu items (i.e. putting all services under 1 item named "services") have a positive or negative effect? Neither? Any advice, tips, or previous experiences on this would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Branding | | Derrald0 -
Help! Odd SERP results on two branded terms.
We have had the ODDEST thing happen to our Branded search. Last week we started seeing our Women’s subdomain (women.duluthtrading.com) outranking our main Duluth Trading domain (duluthtrading.com) on searches for “duluth trading co” and “duluth trading company”. Sample of odd results page: http://screencast.com/t/cKgkaYc1 As you can see- our Women's sub domain is ranking #1 then our main domain, THEN what used to be our organic site links are now listing 3-6. If you search for "duluth trading" though, you will get the typically results page: http://screencast.com/t/qGLDWiM0f We have been trying to figure out how or why this has happened. Our website went out for 30 minutes on January 4th. We thought maybe that is what happened but it has now been 7 days. Any help or suggestions would be great!
Branding | | sderuyter0 -
Having trouble finding the right keywords for an abstract topic
Hello,
Branding | | IamKovacs
My website is about cultural exploration - foreign cultures. (the people, their art, food, music, places, etc.)
By volume, the word culture is referred to other kind of cultures: company culture, city culture, etc. Also, the people who are actually interested in exploring other cultures - be it food, art, music, travel diaries,
etc. usually do not actually type in "Cultural Exploration". How should I target my keyword? Do a bunch of secondary targets that cover specific? Or just use the word and keyword that are naturally related to the content and hope that google figures out who the right people to direct there?0 -
1 Website, 2 Business Names, 2 Locations
I took on a dentist office as an SEO client. They have 1 website, 2 business names and 2 locations. Each location has it's own business name. They are both within the same city as well. I'm not exactly sure where to start with them since they have 2 different business names. If it were 1 name with multiple locations I would just create a Contact Us page for each one, but is that the best thing to do when the location names are different? Should I create a different website for each location or is that smart because then they are competing against each other? Any help from the community on the direction I should take would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Branding | | SilhouetteBS0 -
Should I remove our videos from DotSub.com to try & boost our Wistia videos?
Okay all you video SEO lovers, I had a thought today that I thought would make an interesting question. I have been using the tools at DotSub.com to transcribe our videos. The tools are great, and even better, free. We have about 80 videos on DotSub and all of these videos are also on our YouTube channel. Once I've completed the transcription, I've been exporting the .srt file and uploading them to YouTube to replace the God-awful machine transcriptions (sorry Google, but they are baaaadddd). Anyway, sometimes our DotSub video will outrank the same YouTube video, sometimes not. The 80 videos on DotSub have amassed about 10,000 views and a couple of translations...which is nice, I guess? Recently, we've begun experimenting with Wistia. Here is a search term for which our YouTube and DotSub video results pretty much flood page 1: "studiolive webinar" All of the DotSub videos also exist as Wistia videos on our Website and blog. For obvious reasons, we would rather have our Wistia videos rank in those three positions which right now are dominated by the DotSub versions. Should I remove the content from DotSub in order to try to get the Wistia videos to rank instead? Or should I leave them all there? I should probably add that we do have Wistia videos that are outranking both Dotsub and Youtube versions of the exact same videos...so I know that's possible. I'm just wondering if by leaving all of these videos up at DotSub if we are cannibalizing our potential at ranking for videos that link back to our site? What do you think?
Branding | | danatanseo0 -
.com vs .ca
I have a domain name in mind for my web development company, but unforunatly the .com is already taken. Fortunatly for me though I live in Canada, and the .ca is available. What I want to know is should I go ahead and register my desired .ca or should I continue to look and find a domain name that I can aquire the .ca and the .com ?
Branding | | VebianWebandMobileDevelopment0 -
Which domain name should i choose for a air ticket search engine?
Hi, i am deciding to buy a domain name for a air ticket search engine. i want to target australia first and then worldwide in the future. most of the names with my keywords "cheap flights" are already been registered. I have tried many combination but could not find a proper name. One question is does keywords rich domains (not exact) helps a lot? also i was thinking if i can an keyword rich domain i could easily get links with the desired anchor text links. would it be a lot harder to get a domain name e.g. flightscomparision.com while targeting the term "cheap flights" or "cheap fares". Also i was thinking if i get a domain with "A" at the beginning i will be listed on top of directories. below are a list of domains i am able to register. amcheapflights.com aucheapflights.com abroadflights.com flightscomparision.com any other suggestions? thanks ray
Branding | | usaccess6080