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
-
Create 100% new content in existing page/URL?
We have about 30 pages of content that we are hiding from the website as these articles had some issues. If these pages ranked well, would you recommend that the new content is written within these pages? Meaning, we would replace the content that's in those pages with the same topic and keywords. Or do you think it's best to start a new page instead?
On-Page Optimization | | kvillalobos0 -
Using the Same Word in Every URL
Just looking to get some opinions on this. Some coupon sites use "coupon" in all of their URLs - this is a practice I would avoid, as to me it is a little spammy. For example:
On-Page Optimization | | vanessakohl
.com/amazon-coupons/
.com/ebay-coupons/
.com/walmart-coupons/
... and so on for thousands of other brands. I don't think this is necessary, as Google will understand from the content, backlinks and the domain name (including the word "coupon") that brand pages are coupon-focused. Any other thoughts on this?0 -
Value of URL Changes
Hi Guys, I have a question. Each product listed on my webstie has product number like /product.php?id=3624. After I spent many hours with MOZ, I figured out that this approach is wrong and I should use the product name as URL to achieve better SEO performance. Now I am planing to change the URL generating algoritm but should I do it for existing products. Some of them have already been linked to external websites. I am thinking to create mirror URLs but this may cause rather damage on my website. Do you know what is the right answer? Best, Tony
On-Page Optimization | | Threeding.com0 -
URL structure
Hello all, I am about to sort out my websites link structure, and was wondering which approach to our services page would be best. should we have: services/digital-marketing & services/website-design etc or: digital-marketing/website-design & digital-marketing/seo Basically I see digital marketing as the top level category that is the umbrella term for all of our digital services. But would it make more sense to have service to be the main category and digital marketing within that (along with all the other services from web design to seo)? all thoughts welcome!
On-Page Optimization | | wseabrook0 -
Url lenght/depth - Short or specific?
Hi, I'm trying to decide the best structure for a directory my site offers (containing all the businesses working in the field) and I'm not sure whether to choose something shorter or being more specific. So, I have 3 variables: Type of business (I mean, specific sector) Region City And I'd like to give some strength to every one of it. So, the complete URL (the one I'd like to use) could be: www.mysite.com/sector/region/city/business-name What I was not sure about is...is that too deep? I mean, even thought I'd like to perfectly categorize them and give some strength to every sublevel, I'm not sure about having the business-name so "far" and so "deep". Thank you for your ideas!
On-Page Optimization | | Daniele_Carollo0 -
How to exclude URL filter searches in robots.txt
When I look through my MOZ reports I can see it's included 'pages' which it shouldn't have included i.e. adding filtering rules such as this one http://www.mydomain.com/brands?color=364&manufacturer=505 How can I exclude all of these filters in the robots.txt? I think it'll be: Disallow: /*?color=$ Is that the correct syntax with the $ sign in it? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | neenor0 -
I noticed that my company owns a few exact match domains that are relevant to our business. Is it worth doing anything other than just redirecting them to our homepage?
It turns out we own a few exact match domains that are relevant to our business. Is it worth doing anything other than just redirecting? (We have owned these sites for a long time, over 15 years.) The keywords are moderate to low in traffic and moderate to high in competitiveness. (Right now they 301 to our main site.) I know exact match is not as valuable as it used to be and that there are mixed opinions about microsites...
On-Page Optimization | | Linda-Vassily0 -
How to deal with tracking numbers in URLs
I am working on a site at the minute that has links like this: Jobs in London URL looks like: domain.com/jobs-in-london/ However, my developers insist that they need to use tracking codes, so everytime someone clicks on the above link, they are redirected (301) to a new URL that looks like: domain.com/search/1234567(unique search id) This is killing me when I am trying to get internal pages, like /jobs-in-london/ ranked. What to do?
On-Page Optimization | | MirandaP0