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
-
Does Plus Sign "+" in url affect SEO and Ranking?
there are customized pages on the client's site, they contain brand pages related to Samsung, iPhone, ZTE, LG, Motorola, and HTC Mobile phones.
On-Page Optimization | | dietsuave
For Example:
https://www.unlockninja.com/unlock-apple+phone
https://www.unlockninja.com/unlock-zte+phone
https://www.unlockninja.com/unlock-samsung+phone
Should I recommend them to change the URL structure. ?0 -
Home page keyword in url
I have been looking into SEO for a few weeks now trying to perfect a homepage. Going through various sources on MOZ, and other examples out there on the internet, I keep seeing that you should have your keyword in the URL of the page. The homepage is the page most people want to rank the highest in google searches, however, you cannot put the keyword in the URL as most home page URLs are simply /. Should I actually make the home like this: www.example.com/key-word-example? I would imagine this would not be the normal for many users and would seem like it's not the home page.
On-Page Optimization | | Matthew_smart0 -
Duplicate URL's in Sitemap? Is that a problem?
I submitted a sitemap to on Search Console - but noticed that there are duplicate URLs, is that a problem for Google?
On-Page Optimization | | Luciana_BAH0 -
I have a duplicate URL from example.html to example without .html
I've recently changed my links from example.html to just example, however, moz shows that its been duplicated. Is this effects my ranking? if yes, how i can fix it please?
On-Page Optimization | | aptustelecom0 -
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 -
Can bad text URLs hurt pages?
If you have some pages that contain plain text URLs (not anchored links) that used to be good URLs, but are now bad, either because the website shut down or because it has been acquired by someone else and is now parked (or worse) - are those URLs enough to cause quality problems? For example: This information was brought to you by Waymaker http://www.waymaker.net These aren't the only ones. And yes, I know I should fix them, but there are probably 10,000 pages like it. I will fix them, but its not something I can do in a few minutes. (this one is easy to fix programmatically, but others are a lot more complex) So my question is: do you have actual experience that these are bad enough to cause ranking problems (making them low quality)
On-Page Optimization | | loopyal0 -
URL Strucutre
Hi there, Need some advice please on URL structure. I have been doing SEO for quite sometime now, however one thing that always get me is URL structure. I have a decision to make, its either: URL 1 /conditions/allergies/food/ URL 2 /conditions/allergies-food/ Lets say i am optimizing for the key-phase "Food Allergies" what do you think is best practice? I know that this is not a major factor in gaining high SERPs & maybe i'm thinking about it too much, however your input would be really helpful. Kind Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | Paul780