Great post. I run SEO for a Real Estate Company and the KW we want to rank for is “Atlanta Real Estate.”

The owner of that URL has it parked and wants north of $100k for it, so forget that.

I found AtlantaRealEstateInfo.com for $200 on an auction and bought that instead. Saved right at $99,800 right off the bat and still have the main key word + info.com.

I’ll run Adwords on this theme until I can push this up the rankings and again, you are correct that this URL helps a lot on the Ads Displayed.

Good post overall,

Rob

A lot of my e-commerce clients have benefited from either keyword-targeted landing pages or simply including keywords in the display URL after the domain even if that page doesn’t actually exist. As long as the domain is accurate it is OK. For example XYZ.com/Electric-Bicycles could point to just XYZ.com.

For one thing, on the PPC (paid ad) side of things, there are clear, demonstrable benefits to using a generic keyword-rich domain name that’s an exact match to the business niche you’re targeting.

I recently published the results of a study comparing different Adwords ads within a campaign – every factor was the same from ad to ad (ad headlines, copy text, bids, landing page etc.) with only the domain name of the site (and hence the display URL) varying.

The result: the ad with the generic domain in the URL which exactly matched the niche that the campaign was running in (electric bicycles, and ElectricBicycles.co.uk) brought in up to twice the traffic of the two “competing” ads which used a semi-targeted domain (YourBikes.co.uk) and a “coined” non-generic domain (InAHurry.co.uk) respectively.

You can read the details, including full campaign stats, charts of the relative performance of the different ads, and an analysis of the results of the test over on my site at http://www.memorabledomains.co.....mains.html

Secondly, your analysis overlooks the fact that even if the most desirable domain name isn’t available to register from scratch, it may well still be obtainable on the aftermarket for an amount which makes strong commercial sense to a company serious about its web presence.

After all, outside of the top generics for massive markets, it’s often possible to pick up strong generic domains for particular niches for just a few thousand dollars, an amount that pales in comparison to many other forms of marketing (think about the cost of buying a newspaper or trade journal ad, taking a stand at an exhibition, or even running a major PPC campaign)

The purchase of the most appropriate domain name for their target market is one of the most cost-effective moves a company can make, simply because they gain ongoing benefits forever for a one-time up-front investment.

You can search many key words and the top 20 results will have a high percentage of URLs with said keywords included. I know there are many more factors, but why downplay this obvious one?

And yes, moving a site URL is completely insane. Those that have done it before, like me, know!

Thanks. Good article.

RM