Close URL owned by competitors.
-
The following example is exactly analogous to our situation (site names slightly altered
We own www.business-skills.com. It's our main site.
We don't own, and would rather avoid paying for, www.businessskills.com. It's a parked domain and the owners want a very large sum for it.
We own www.business-skills.co.uk and point it to our main site.
We don't own www.businessskills.co.uk. This is owned by our biggest competitor.
We also own www.[ourbrand].com and .co.uk, and point them to the main site.
My question is - how much traffic do you think we may be missing due to these nearly-but-not-quite URL matches? Does it matter in terms of lost revenue? What sort of things should I be looking at to get a very rough estimate?
-
Half our domain contains a very prominent keyword for our business. The second half is less so prominent. Few to none would use a search exactly like our domain name to find our services.
Did you ever consider moving your site from www.k-w.com to www.kw.com after you bought it?
This is the second part of my quandary - even if I pay the $24,000 that is being asked for www.kw.com, I still have to consider whether constantly quoting to people 'oh it's www dot keyword hyphen keyword dot com' is worth it, and whether the negatives of having a hyphenated domain outweigh the negatives of losing rankings for ages by moving.
This is moving away from the original question a bit, and though I'd love to discuss this with you further, I understand if you don't have time.
-
Yes, your competitor might do it.
If it is a KW.com it might rank easily for KW queries.
You are building a business on poorly defined turf.
-
Oh, easily. But you do make me think that, if we do continue to growing as we are, if we don't pay for that domain, somebody else might do.
-
heh.... good point.
-
Do you rank number one for your domain with the hyphen in it? Do you want to prevent someone else coming into your market?
-
OK... 12 monthly local searches... not a lot.
Our number was 1000 and that justified paying the ransom. However, a few years ago we would have been at 12 like you. The seller of the domain without the hyphen knew that our traffic was growing and he used that information to ask more.
If I was you, I would buy now if you are building a good site and if you want that domain.
-
Our site does come up in Adwords, but only with 12 monthly local searches. We are also shown in the instant search menu.
I may, like you, have to be held to ransom for the non-hyphenated domain ...
-
If you have a website that people request by name then getting the domain without the hyphens is very important in my opinion.
Our domain was longer than yours. I don't know how many people type our domain in the address bar - that data is not possible to obtain. However, if you use the number of domain queries in google or see if your domain appears in the Adwords Keyword tool then you can get some idea of domain query volume. If google lists your domain in the Adwords keyword tool then you have at least the beginning of a brand and should consider getting rid of that hyphen. The same if your domain shows in the instant search menu.
-
Thanks for your response, I appreciate it
Do you think many people still type in longer domains like ours?
I'm finding it really hard to get any data on searching vs typed in domains. I feel like it should be out there but somehow, I'm missing it.
-
We had a k-w.com that was getting over 1000 domain queries per month. The owner of kw.com wanted a ransom for the domain and knew that we were getting some nice traffic because he was getting some of it. We refused to pay for years but finally paid it because the harder we worked the more traffic we lost.
We justified paying for it on the basis of a few lost sales per week over the next several years. Plus getting a domain that was much easier to communicate.
-
As for the traffic: Most people don't manually enter a URL in their browser's adress bar anymore. They usually use Google to find / identify sites of interest. IMHO only a very small minority (tech geeks like me, etc. ) still use their adress bar. Whenever I talk to someone and mention the adress bar they think I was talking about the Google search bar on google.com.
So you'd be only losing a small proportion of traffic. I remember that years ago when a company got a new domain they registered it in like 300 different kinds of spelling.. Still: Less than 2 % of total traffic was coming through those sites, as they were never properly advertised nor used. Here in Germany even Google has a problem with that. There's a guy, who owns gmail.de and sent a court order to Googleplex that they may not use gmail.com for German users but that they have to run their service via google.com/mail . I don't suspect Google Mail has gotten a lot les popular by that
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
-
Hi i have a few pages with duplicate content but we've added canonical urls to them, but i need help understanding what going on
hi google is seeing many of our pages and dupliates but they have canonical url on there https://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/maxi-shirt-dress.html has tags https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html
On-Page Optimization | | hijabgem
has tagshttps://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/quickview/index/view/id/4693
has tags
my question is which page takes authority?and are they setup correct, can you have more than one link rel="canonical" on one page?0 -
Changing url (permalink) structure of website??
Currently I'm working on SEO of one website www.mocomi.com. I want to change url (permalink) structure of entire website which has more than 5000 pages. Currently website have structure of http://mocomi.com/tenali-raman-the-kings-condition/ Which I want to change it to http://mocomi.com/fun/stories/tenali-raman/tenali-raman-the-kings-condition/ Likewise I want to change entire website permalink url structure to make site architecture more SEO friendly. Which means I'am going to add only categories & subcategories before actual link. Kindly guide with following questions which I need to move forward with this step. How much is it worth to change URL structure? Checklist or factors I need to consider while making this decision? Is it a good practice to change URL's of entire website at once or Should I change it in Parts? How much time it takes google to rank those urls again? Which are the best practices to do so?
On-Page Optimization | | Mocomi1 -
URL, page title, item name - which is most important for google ranking
We are a bridal store and are able to use different information in the URL, Page title and item name. In item name we give the product a name for us to identify ie. Alex Lace Dress in Black/Nude, Ivory/Nude, Red/Red In Page Title we use the suppliers name and product code as well as the item name ie. Jadore j8075 Alex Lace Dress Online Australia URL = alex-lace-dress/ Are we using the correct format ? What could we do to improve them?
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
How defined does the anchor text need to be for a domain url?
Ok, I'm looking to clean up my domain with irrelevant Anchor text linking to specific URL's. Whether, it's my root domain or a particular product URL. I'm finding a wide variety of terms (anchor text) pointing to my homepage, category and finally my product pages. Example, the Anchor text "Paragon Print Systems" is pointing to my homepage "barcodefactory.com" does this hurt my homepage enough to either have the link/anchor text removed from linking to my homepage? thanks much!, Warren
On-Page Optimization | | Warren.W0 -
URL for a new website
Hi, I am creating a new website for a client. Is it best to include the keywords from the most common search in the domain name, they would like: forenamesurname.com but should I be recommending: weddingmakeupbyforename.com Does it make much difference to search rankings if the keyword is in the domain name? Thanks v much
On-Page Optimization | | danieldunn100 -
Should I be using the town or city in url with my keyword or keyphrase?
should I be using the town or city in url with my keyword or keyphrase? So lets say I'm trying to rank for butchers in home town should i put the town in the url as well so www.website.com/butchers-in-mytown is that bad? Or would it be best to just put www.website.com/butchers?
On-Page Optimization | | genkee0 -
No Data Available for this URL
Hi,
On-Page Optimization | | ostiguyj
I really don't understand why I have this message "No data available for this URL"
in my SEOMOZ campain. (www.bienchezsoi.ca) When I look at my page rank, I get a score of 0 I have no idea of to fix it. Please help. Thanks0 -
2 URLs, same content, 1 with keywords. Does this hurt me?
I'm in the process of adding some new features to our site and have a question about our URLs. Most of our URLs consist of either sitename.com/contentname or sitename.com/content/contentid I'm in the process of building a directory to those pages. The directory has a number of filters which will ultimately point to the destination page. sitename.com/filter1/filter2/contentid or sitename.com/filter1/filter2/contentname The destinations will have references. From an SEO perspective, I would think I want the filter1/filter2 version of the link indexed since this will add keywords that someone might search for. However, since the filters are dynamic, if someone just searches for contentname I would want to have sitename.com/contentname returned in the search results. Do I get any SEO benefit out of building those filter links as described if they are not the canonical links?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeCotellese810