Close URL owned by competitors.

[JacobFunnell]

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?

[akaigotchi]

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

[EGOL]

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.

[JacobFunnell]

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.

[EGOL]

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.

[JacobFunnell]

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 ...

[EGOL]

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.

[therealmarkhall]

Do you rank number one for your domain with the hyphen in it? Do you want to prevent someone else coming into your market?

[EGOL]

heh.... good point.

[JacobFunnell]

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.

[EGOL]

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.

[JacobFunnell]

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.