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
-
URL keyword separator best practice
Hello. Wanted to reach out see what the consensus is re-keyword separators So just taken on a new client and all their urls are structured like /buybbqpacks rather than buy-bbq-packs - my understanding is that it comes down to readability, which influences click through, rather than search impact on the keyword. So we usually advise on a hyphen, but the guy's going to have to change ALLOT of pages & setup redirects to change it all wasn't sure if it was worth it? Thanks! Stu
On-Page Optimization | | bloomletsgrow0 -
Best practice for URL structure - short and sweet, or double keyword?
We are just about to re-jig our main category pages and have found that different leading sites have taking different views on short and sweet url structure vs. repeated keywords1. For our website we have two options. We have two options: mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants-in-birmingham or mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants Someone like opentable have gone for short and sweet (opentable.co.uk/birmingham-restaurants) whereas people like Time Out have gone longer with multiple matches in the url (timeout.com/london/food-drink/londons-top-50-restaurants). Is there a consensus on which is better?
On-Page Optimization | | HireSpace0 -
Wordpress category url problem.
I have set up wordpress categories but the permalinks are showing as www.mydomain.com/?cat=12 as opposed to the category name. The child categories though work fine and show as www.mydomain.com/category/chidcatgegory I've obviously got my permalink settings wrong somewhere. How do I fix this?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
URL / Meta info for Author bio pages
When you create a biography page for authors that point back to their G+ account, do you include any other signals in the URL other than the authors name? For example, would you use www.domain.com/sam-spade or www.domain.com/sam-spade-biography, etc? Similar question for the meta description. Do you add any signals there? Or, is rel=author strong enough. Best,
On-Page Optimization | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
What are the best practices for google indexing ajax response urls?
We just did a build to our site and our server erros went up to over 9,500. After looking into it, it seems like google is crawling the ajax urls and coming back with the errors. Here is one example http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/productDetail.do?navType=type&vehicleId=1423&webTypeId=68&navTitle=Drive&webCatId=9&prodFamilyId=29660 If you know of any good articles on this please send them my way.
On-Page Optimization | | DoRM0 -
Keyword in URL?
I have a website that has been live for about 8yrs. I do not have any significant rankings for my main keywords but am now starting SEO on my site. I am contemplating changing the url to contain the main keyword prefixed by my brand name. Any views on the ranking benefits and or CTR benefits.
On-Page Optimization | | Johnnyh
Example:
Main Volume keyword - 'car leasing'
current url - www.bobleasing.co.uk (made up name) thinking of changing to - www.bobcarleasing.co.uk (made up name) Any advice would be much appreciated. John0 -
Long url > 115
Hi, in my web code I have link to my images that are resize online and the link is very long. like this src="http://img.espectador.com/mediadelivery/?fn=&i_enc=1&i_a=L2hvbWUvZXNwZWN0YWRvci93d3cvaW1hZ2VuZXMvMjUwMTY2XzEzNDk5NTQ0NjFfY29uc3RydWNjaW9uLmpwZw==&i_cl=1&i_tr=100&i_q=70&i_rt=0&i_w=250&i_h=188&i_wtmrk=" alt="Paro parcial de Sunca" border="0"/> I have a lot of warning in my reports with this and I would like to omit this warnings How can I do that? noindex? nofollow? Thanks The original page that contain that code is this http://www.espectador.com/noticias/250166/paro-parcial-de-sunca Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | informatica8100 -
How to Define Best URL Structure for Product Pages?
I am working on my website to edit structure with help of Google's search engine optimization starter guide. There is really good instruction to define URL structure which help us to perform well over Google's organic search. I have resolved issues regarding category pages but, I have confusion to define best URL structure for product pages. My website's product page URL structure is as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/marketumbrellas-californiaumbrella-slpt758-f13-red.html http://www.vistastores.com/homefurniture-winsomewood-93630.html URL structure is constructed with following terms. 1. Root Category Name (Market Umbrellas or Home Furniture or ....) 2. Brand Name 3. Manufacturer Part Number I am not happy with this structure and also not performing well over Google's organic search. I am thinking to include product name or title tag in URL after root domain. But, it may create very long URL and create issues in organic search display. Does it really matter to perform well over Google's organic search? How can I define best URL structure for product pages?
On-Page Optimization | | CommercePundit0