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
-
Is the URL Matching the Page Title Important?
Hello I have tried searching for an answer on this but I can't get a clear answer due to the results when searching for URL title. I have just launched our second Shopify site for one of our brands. My first site launched in 2014 but when I launched I didn't pay much heed to SEO for page titles, URLs, etc so have retrospectively fixed this over time. For my Shopify site just launching I want to get it as right as possible from the start (learning from mistakes). My question is regarding URLs and what my approach should be for better SEO. So, I have a page with a Title of Newton Leather Wallets, Purses, Card Holders & Glasses Cases and the URL is https://www.tumbleandhide.com/collections/newton-leather-wallets-card-holders It was my understanding that I should try and make the URL reflect the Page Title more accurately. The problem is that this takes the character count to 77. On other pages it can be in the 80s. Will the above link be better for SEO than say just https://www.tumbleandhide.com/collections/newton I am just wary of the URL's being too long as my Moz Site Crawl is returning a lot of URLs that are too long. Thanks in Advance.
On-Page Optimization | | lukegj0 -
Canonical URL Tag Usage
I have a large website, almost 1500 pages that each market different keywords for the trucking logistics industry. I don't really understand the new Canonical URL Tag USAGE. They say to use it so the page is not a duplicate but the page that MOZ is call for to have the tag isn't a duplicate. It promotes 1 keyword that no other page directly promotes. Here is the page address, now what tag would I put up in the HEAD so google don't treat it as a duplicate page. http://www.freightetc.com/c/heavyhaul/heavyhaul.php 1. Number 1 the actual page address because I want it treated like its own page or do I have to use #2 below? 2. I don't know why I would use #2 as I want it to be its own page, and get credit and listed and ranked as its own page. Can anyone clarify this stuff to me as I guess i am just new to this whole tag usage.
On-Page Optimization | | dwebb0070 -
Does a URL forward slash break up an exact match phrase?
I've seen some organisations implementing keyword phrases per URL with forward slashes in-between the keywords. Would this still work for broad AND exact match keywords when the search engine references the URL? Here's an example with the keyword being "scuola di lingue tedesco". http://www.esl.ch/it/adulti/scuola-di-lingue/tedesco/index.htm Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | featherseo0 -
Keyword repeats/presence in url's & over-optimisation
Hi I'm about to launch a redesigned site and worried about overdoing kw presence on-page, primarily using in url's since will already be using kw in titles as well as page content. What's current thinking re over optimisation: If kw is in titles and page content is it best not to repeat again in url structure i.e. less is more, even though this will cause things like SeoMoz on-page grade score to fall, or better to keep them/add them ? Personally i think it makes sense to include kw in url again since helps make the page relevant, and so long as matches the content should help as opposed to hinder rankings for the pages target keyword. However when i look into this some say don't do this since is over-optimisation The sites generally ranking quite well for its target kw which i obviously don't want to lose after re-launch & hopefully improve further, in the case of this example they are 'Sports Centre Services' & 'Sports Centre Equipment Rental'). The sites current url structure is similar to this below example: frankssportscentres.com/services/sports-centre-equipment-rental Would it be better to keep following existing/above format or to go with either of the below options i.e. more kw rich urls or less: frankssportscentres.com/sports-centre-services/sports-centre-equipment-rental Or frankssportscentres.com/sports-centre-services/equipment-rental Or even less frankssportscentres.com/services/equipment-rental Many Thanks in advance for any helpful comments Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Brand Name URL Redirecting to Actual URL
So we have already built a site under a parent company's URL: parentcompany.com And now we have their branded product lines in directories: parentcompany.com/brand-name1, and parentcompany.com/brand-name2 We also own the actual URL Brand Name 1 (which is also the exact description of the product): brandname1.com We do not yet own the URL for Brand Name 2 (which is also the exact description of the product): brandname2.com. This is because a squatter is sitting on it and is asking $10,000+ for it. What we are trying to determine is how valuable these brand name URLs are since they will be redirecting and not the actual site's primary domain name. Anybody know how much of an effect owning those and redirecting has on ranking for those brand names that are also very descriptive of the products? Would we be smarter to spend $10,000 on adwords or 10,000 on the domain? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | grayloon1 -
Which method should I use for my URL structure?
I have an existing site that is currently utilizing a structure that is like this: http://www.mysite.com/Ohio/City-of-Cleveland-PRODUCT-NAME Should I restructure it like: http://www.mysite.com/Ohio/City-of-Cleveland/Product-Name We are doing very well with very specific searches already but are sometimes coming in 2nd and 3rd place. For example: If I search for CLEVELAND PRODUCT NAME I always come up in the top three and about 60% of the time I am #1. I want to make it better. We have only launched in 4 states but plan on launching an additional 4 states over the next few weeks and I want to make sure we are building things properly. Any feedback would be wonderful. As usual, thanks everyone!! -Alex
On-Page Optimization | | dbuckles0 -
Duplicate content issue with dynamically generated url
Hi, For those who have followed my previous question, I have a similar one regarding dynamically generated urls. From this page http://www.selectcaribbean.com/listing.html the user can make a selection according to various criteria. 6 results are presented and then the user can go to the next page. I know I should probably rewrite url's such as these: http://www.selectcaribbean.com/listing.html?pageNo=1&selType=&selCity=&selPrice=&selBeds=&selTrad=&selMod=&selOcean= but since all the results presented are basically generated on the fly for the convenience of the user, I am afraid google my consider this as an attempt to generate more pages as there are pages for each individual listing. What is my solution for this? Nofollow these pages? Block them thru robots txt?
On-Page Optimization | | multilang0 -
URL question
Hi guys, the pro campaign thing you got going is wicked, love it. I'm recieving good results with my keywords and have noticed that categories that go beyond sub/sub/sub don't do to well. So I wanna move those that do one step up which makes it go from: http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/advanced-routine/scales/aeolian to here http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/advanced-routine/aeolian The existing menu system that follow all these categories across the site will soon go so it won't be a user friendly problem, I will have other type of menus. But, and here is the question: Would I greatly benefit from taking the non existent menu away and just go for: http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/aeolian while i'm at it? Or do I stick with my current structure? I guess my real question is; how much is there to flat URLs? Cheers -dan lundholm spytunes.com
On-Page Optimization | | spytunes0