Client hell bent on grabbing a competitive .net domain

[UrbanMark]

Hi all,

Firstly, i'm a content guy!  Thrown into SEO at the deep end, but absolutley loving it and the community.

I need some advice, so i'm popping my cherry with this one:

I have a client who is in the service industry, very competitive  and in a City, so it's all local.  He has branded site that has had little investment in SEO and a huge PPC spend over the years.  After a lot of nagging they are getting the message that PPC is a massive money tap and as soon as it's turned off that's it - gone!

They have had conversations and hit me up with this as their want.

Example:  They see www.londoncakebakers.com / .co.uk which is a site belonging to Smiths Cakes.

They have spotted that www.londoncakebakers.net is free to purchase!  You know what's coming right?

They want to buy it, get me to design a site for it and deploy SEO on it in a big way!  The key phrases are all in the domain name and all the obvious benefits.  Am I over thinking this and should embrace it, or should I advise, no, no, no?

Thanks in advance.

Mark

[TomRayner]

Hi Mark

Welcome to the community mate!

My advice would be to be purchase the domain if they insist, but focus all of your SEO and marketing efforts on their branded website.  And here's why:

Two things were apparent in 2012.  First, Google were targeting low quality Exact Match Domains (EMD), which the one you mentioned above would be initially   They released an EMD update that you can read about here.

That's not to say that EMDs do not work if they are a quality website - they absolutely can.  But the playing field, as it were, has become a lot more level, so if you have two sites with identical "strength", but one has a branded URL and one an exact match URL, Google is really working towards making the EMD not have an advantage over the other - and I'd say they're very nearly there.

Now, you could invest your SEO and search marketing on the new domain and make it an 'authority' site, but I would much rather stick with using the brand URL.  Another thing that was apparent in 2012 with all of the updates that were released, particularly Penguin, is that Google is starting to favour brands and authority websites that come with it.

From a marketing perspective in general, I'd also advise your team to stick with a branded URL.  The entire digital marketing scene is coming much more in line with normal marketing practices (mainly down to digital marketing now becoming the primary marketing channel of them all) and Google is certainly trying to reflect this when it comes to SEO.  If you have a branded URL you're always promoting brand awareness, you can build on your name and reputation online and there's no mistaking your identity.

Deploy your SEO to the branded URL.  It might be worth picking up the URL anyway and see if there's something you can do with it in the future (maybe your company could host a London-wide competition for bakers and market it under that URL, for example), domains are relatively cheap now anyway.

Hope this helps and welcome aboard once again!

[Bondara]

Hi Mark,

It's not a big deal, more work if anything.

But I don't believe that .net EMD will bring any exact match boost, only the .co.uk and .com will really give you that (I have done some work with EMD's and that's what I have found).

I suppose the only thing to worry about is if it takes a little longer to rank because it's fresh, im guessing they want the EMD because they think it will have some sort of magical powers to jump to page 1?

[UrbanMark]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the really good reply there.  It's very much an echo of my gut feeling.

I think i'm going to plump for, picking up the domain name, creating the clients site, putting 80% of SEO efforts into the branded site and the other 20% at keeping the exact match on the go as almost a side project, as they will hoover up some clicks based on the search term.

Thanks again for the welcome and the advice, it's much appreciated.

Mark

[UrbanMark]

Thanks for that.

They are quite realistic really and know it will bring fewer clicks but more targeted visits based on the theory of EMD vs Searchers queries.  I was really not too sure of the value of the .net myself so thanks for that.

More food for thought

Cheers

[RobertFisher]

Tom,

This was a very, very good explanation. Thanks

[EGOL]

Yes, I am starting to read any of his posts that I see.

[TomRayner]

You two flatter me greatly.

I can honestly say that I learnt from the best community and the best within the community, present company included.

Mark, if you're still reading at this point, you'd do very well to heed advice from these two, plus so so many others in this community.  Enjoy your time here!

[UrbanMark]

Still reading and blown away with the speed and quality of advice, it's excellent and I can see the talent pool is worth keeping in touch with.  I hope I can help you guys out with content or design related questions sometime.

Thanks again

Mark

[KeriMorgret]

I don't know if these are sample or actual domains, but also consider if there is a chance of any legal implications of choosing a similar domain -- for example if you tried to register google.co and put up a search engine, Google would have issues with that.

[UrbanMark]

Thanks Keri,

Yes the domains I gave were examples not the real domains, to demonstrate a service industry.

That was in my thinking, however, as it's a service and that service being "cake baking in London" and not www.smithscakes.com and my client buying "www.smithscakes.net, i was a tad unsure but after some research i "think" that should be fine as there are no TM infringements. Also the .com owner leads the visitor not by saying welcome to "domain name" but welcome to "brand name".

So they would be competing on service not brand.

Hope that helps shed a bit more light on it for you.  Lesson there to structure my inital post with more meat on the bones.

Thanks

Mark