Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
My Domain Name - short vs relevant
-
I'm creating a website for my new web design company in Vancouver. I'm looking to target such keywords as "Web Design Vancouver", etc.
I have another company with a hyphenated domain name which is terrible when I'm on the phone and my client asks me for my domain (hard to say, always spelling it out).
Also I wanted to have a good snappy name for my new business so I found a 6 letter .com and matching .ca for my company.
My question is: is it best to use a short domain name or is it better have my keywords in the domain name?
eg. xyz.com vs xyzvancouverwebdesign.com
Thanks
-
Thank you for your quick responses. I'm not going to purchase other domains such as xyzwebdesign.com as I'm only going to be SEOing one domain, in particular it will be xyz.ca, I do however own xyz.com and xyz.net and will 301 redirect those to the .ca.
Because I'm a company in Canada I figure I should optimize my .ca, and make that my main domain and not my .com.
-
What about getting both domain names anyway? I always thought it is good practice to buy the related domain names so the competition can't get them? You would redirect/point the longer name and the hyphenated names to the shorter one. I'm not sure of any seo benefits except the competition doesn't benefit from your name.
-
That is what I was gonna suggest too. In general I favor short domains, even though bookmarking has come so far in the past 10 years. Everyone bookmarks everything these days, so you don't need to worry as much about spelling and remembering a long name. With that said I still like the short domains.
Branding will be a big part with the shorter, new domain name. You can make up for the lack of keywords in the domain name with some quality content and strong, local links.
-
If you can get a really good relevant domain then go with that, but a hyphenated domain is not really good. I personally have found that I would rather go with short and easy, given the absence of good keyword domains.
SEO can't be my only strategy, especially for a new site, so being able to tell people about my site verbally and them find it easily is more important to me.
-
I agree, get a great domain name that is short & user friendly and concentrate on building the brand. You can still SEO the site and as Elias mentioned, any benefit of exact match domains is being slowly chipped away so concentrate on your users.
I wish I had known what I know now when I registered my company and domain name!
-
Hi Jonathan,
This is difficult....You have to balance the benefits for the visitors and the search engines.
Although, having relevant domain names still works for gaining good rankings it is not as powerful as it once was. It may eventually not be part of Google's algorithm at all with future updates.
Due to that fact alone I would go with the short name and concentrate on targeting Vancouver web design on-page and with links. I think this would help to future-proof your website and would be more user friendly.
On a side note - I would avoid hyphenated domain names as it is widely believed that Google uses this as a spam indicator.
I hope this helps!
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
-
Hreflang Errors 404 vs "Page Not Found"
For a websites that differ between catalogs (PDPs) what hreflang error causes the least harm? Obviously the best solution is to only have hreflang for shared products, but this takes more work to implement. So when no identical product exists... 1. Hreflang points to 404 or 410 error. 2. Hreflang points to 200 status "Page Not Found" page. This obviously has the additional issue of needing to point back to 100+ urls. I want to avoid having Google decide to ignore all hreflang due to errors as many correct urls will exist. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | rigelcable0 -
How can I outrank a website whose brand is named specifically after a product / service (and mine is not!) ?
Hi everyone, I've been working hard on my on-page SEO lately so I can gain visibility for my website. The results have been great and I am now on top of the SERP for the services I propose. I think that my content is almost fully optimize and** I've respected all the best practices (both on-page and technical SEO)**. However, there is one problem I just can't deal with for I don't have the knowledge, hence this post. I'm pretty sure that this issue is quite common for SEO experts. Here the thing: I offer dental emergency services, which is my core business. I'm ranked 4th for that request in my area, which is good, but I'd like to rank 1st as** I have a better DA and content than the 3 websites outranking me**. Also, I'm the first result for any other related services such as "dental services" or "dentist". However, when it comes to the theme "dental emergency", I'm constantly outranked by the same 3 websites. I ran an audit on their website but **my content and technical SEO is way better **than theirs. I suppose that the only reason I'm behind them is because they used "dental emergency" in their **Brand name **and, therefore, in the Home page URL. Every time someone is looking up online for "dental emergency", these websites will be on top of the SERP as I think that Google is unable to know whether the users are specifically looking for their websites (aka Brand) or for "dental emergency" services. Here is an example of a competitor: https://www.urgencedentairedemontreal.com/ (urgence meaning emergency in French). His whole Brand name and URL have been built after the "dental emergency." service. On the contrary, **my Brand name does not mention "urgence". ** I see that as a trick that is confusing Google. The fact that my competitors named their Brand after a specific service I also offer is real pain for my SEO. I also think it's really unfair as I've put a lot of effort in designing a nice website with great UX and content. This is the kind of practice that should be penalized in my opinion. Please, does anyone know any way to resolve this issue?
On-Page Optimization | | AlexTL0 -
The company brand name does not show in SERP
Our company is ranking no.1 for brand keyword, however, when you try to find it by two words(with space between) then all those shows up and the website is nowhere to find. Any suggestions on how to solve this without the need to be ranked for something related
On-Page Optimization | | GardenPet0 -
Internal Linking - in content vs navigation menu
Would like to get some thoughts on whether navigation menus or in-content links are best for internal linking, from an SEO standpoint. A few thoughts to get started with: For sites with a lot of content, you can have a navigation menu linking to your higher-level pages, then in-content links to deeper pages on your site. For smaller sites, this is not an option, as the navigation menu will probably link to all your important pages. You could add in-content links, but Google only counts the first link on the page, so the in-content links would be ignored if you'd already linked yp the page in your top nav menu. I can think of several possible reasons navigation menu links could be less desirable than in content links from a Google perspective. (They are sitewide boilerplate content without context.) If you setup your navigation structure based on what is best for the user, small sites don't have much wiggle room to optimize internal link structure, as all their money pages will be linked to from the top nav menu. Do you think Google prefers in content links to navigation menu links? If so, how do you get around the fact that for many sites, all their money pages are being linked to from their main navigation menu?
On-Page Optimization | | AdamThompson0 -
Important keywords in product names
Hi! among other we sell motorcycle clothing, which you can buy as a set (both jacket and pants) or single piece. Currently we name the products with the labeling in the beginning, e.g: Motorcycle pants R2000, Motorcycle jacket R2000, Motorcycle kit R2000 Motorcycle pants R4000, Motorcycle jacket R4000, Motorcycle kit R4000 This is causing keyword stuffing and cannibalization in the category pages as all the product names include important keywords. On the other hand it would be beneficial to keep the labeling in the name for search queries for the exact product. What be your recommendations? I tend to take the labeling away.
On-Page Optimization | | RomiSverige0 -
Landing Pages: New Domain or Sub Folder?
I use premise for landing pages. I have some extra domain names that are fantastic in my industry. I'm wondering if I should use those domains for these landing pages? The header, nav, footer, would be the same as my main site, the body and content would be totally different. will google penalize me if I have the same header and footer on a landing page?
On-Page Optimization | | homebizsmart0 -
How do we handle sitemaps in robots.txt when multiple domains point to same physical location?
we have www.mysite.net, www.mysite.se, www.mysite.fi and so on. all of these domains point to the same physical location on our webserver, and we replace texts given back to client depending on which domain he/she requested. My problem is this: How do i configure sitemaps in robots.txt when robots.txt is used by multiple domains? If I for instance put the rows Sitemap: http://www.mysite.net/sitemapNet.xml
On-Page Optimization | | nordicnetproducts
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.net/sitemapSe.xml in robots.txt, would that result in some cross submission error?0 -
Www1 and www domain
hi, I have a client who has an e-commerce business. My client does not want to fill the pages with too much content and has set up a www1 version with the same domain-name as the www. The plan is to create a lot of content and push www1 in ranking and then sending users (via links) to the www for ordering. Although there will be no duplicate content published on www and www1 this seems like an odd strategy, especially since the www already has a good page rank, and I'm not sure about how engines view a www.domain.com and www1domain.com situation even with unique content in each. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | vibelingo0