Mindy Gofton

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So you have a brand. You sell red widgets, but really high end, luxury widgets with all the bells and whistles. You learned to make widgets by hand when you were 14 and you take great pride in your work - and people phone you from all over the country when they want a really special red widget.

When you first set up in business, you chose the name your brand very carefully, so it's unique, memorable and evokes your brand values and history.

This week you decided you wanted to make the move online. People are always asking whether you have a website so they can see pictures of your widgets and read information about how you make them. You've realised it would be a great way to capture traffic and would save you a bomb in printing brochures so you hire a web designer and a developer and they also bring someone called an 'SEO consultant' into the meeting to help you market your site online.

Choosing a Domain Name - Your Brand or Your Primary Keyword?


The first thing you have to do, they explain, is register a domain name. You want to use the name of your brand because it's how people know you - only your SEO consultant tells you that instead you should  buy the domain www.luxury-red-widgets.com because your brand name doesn't have any keywords and it may harm your ability to rank in Google.

Can anyone tell me that this isn't an entirely ludicrous scenario?

Yet, even today, with all the technology in place to understand websites, it is still possible to get a huge boost in the SERPs just by having a keyword rich domain name - something made even more ludicrous still by the fact that as more businesses go online, there's fewer and fewer decent keyword-rich domain names left.

So, if you're lucky enough to own www.mobile-phones.com is it really right that you should have a decided advantage in ranking over a site called www.bobsfonestuff.com if Bob's business is just as legitimate, well-optimised and well-coded and his only mistake was buying a domain relating to his offline brand instead of buying www.mobile-phones.com?

Take the SERP for 'lcd televisions', for instance.

LCD Televisions SERP

The first result  goes to a very generic looking blog site set up using a template linked to the faceless "Electrical-Deals.co.uk" shop - but set up on "http://discountlcdtv.co.uk/" - something which sets alarm bells ringing for me. Not a great result as I wouldn't trust a site which has one URL in its logo and another on my screen.

#1 result for LCD televisions

Result #2 is an affiliate site full of ads. Despite saying it's a review site, I couldn't find any reviews - I gave up after being sent off site 3 times via an affiliate link masquerading as "more info."

#2 result for LCD televisions

These are not what you'd consider great results - they're not even particularly well-optimised sites - so one can only assume that their domain names - which contain 'LCD' in them - are helping them rank for these big money terms.

What I would expect to find when I type in "LCD Televisions" are some legitimate sites - Amazon is at #3, but I wouldn't bat an eyelid if it were at #1. Where's Sony? Panasonic? Toshiba? Where's Currys? Comet? Thankfully, Richer Sounds is in there at #10, below Pixmania, Kelkoo and Pricerunner - also established brands you'd expect to find - but brands lacking keywords in their domain names. All of these sites regularly rank very well for equally competitive keywords so I cannot imagine that our top 2 have done a better job of optimising for 'LCD televisions'.

While I understand the logic of using the name of a specific page as an indication of subject - I mean why would you call a page about bird watching lcd-televisions.html - using the domain name itself as a factor in the algorithm is something that really needs to go. It's causing a lot of garbage to clog up the SERPs and it's also diluting the effect of having a really great, identifiable brand name - and it's penalising businesses for not being the first to have bought a domain name rather than rewarding them for building great websites.

To learn about a host of other stupid ranking factors, take a look at our SEO training page.
Tags: Google, Search Engine Rankings, SEO Training

Discussion

Posted by Eddy Gonzalez on Jun 3rd, 2010
Interesting article. You have a point about keywords in domain being slightly unfair when it comes to ranking, however the reason that sites with keywords in their domain rank so well, is because when external sites link back to the site, they use the domain name in the anchor text which inevitably contain the target keywords i.e. http://www.luxury-red-widgets.com.
We all know that keywords in anchor text is the most important ranking factor around.
If you do an allinanchor command in Google with 'LCD televisions' as the query, you'll find that the first two results are the two sites you mention.
So we go back to argument, is it fair that somebody buys a keyword rich domain and ranks well? Well my view is that it's good link strategy planning on their part, and it just means that the rest of us have to work harder to create great content that sites will want to link to using our keywords in their anchor text.
Posted by Kate on Jun 4th, 2010
It isn't always the case that it is the anchor text linking in from external sites that allows keyword rich url's to rank. I have been investigating an SEO strategy for a new client recently, who's incumbent SEO company has created a load of keyword rich url microsites. These microsite domains are ranking well for their relevant keyword search terms, but have poor/virtually non-existent link profiles.

While we all know that microsites created for this purpose are an outdated strategy and often portray a vastly reduced reflection of the business, therefore being unlikely to convert, the fact that such url's are obviously still acting as a ranking factor in Google creates an excuse for such poor SEO.

I agree with Mindy - sort it out Google!
Posted by Gary on Jun 8th, 2010
Would the URL http://www.bobsfonestuff.com/mobile-phones not be as beneficial as http://www.mobile-phones.com?

I'm sure the best approach is to have your brand name as the domain and then create dynamic URLs for each category of your website. For example;

http://www.bobsfonestuff.com/mobile-phones
http://www.bobsfonestuff.com/smart-phones
http://www.bobsfonestuff.com/phone-chargers

I'm no expert but would still appreciate your thoughts on this...
Posted by Mindy on Jun 8th, 2010
@Eddie - I've perhaps not chosen the best example because the better ones I have involve client sites. I have seen repeatedly sites with poor quality content, few links and little relevance to what would seem to be user intent ranking for phrases because the phrase = the domain name. If I find a better example I can use, I'll update.

@Gary Ideally, what you're asking should be fine - having the keyword as the page name should be more than enough to establish relevance. In reality, often a keyword-rich domain name does help sometimes, although you could argue in some instances domain age and trust will play a factor. A site like mobile-phones.com has probably been a registered domain longer than bobsfonestuff.com.

None of these things are insurmountable issues, it's just one of those pet peeves of mine regarding what I perceive to be problems with Google's algorithm which positively encourage spammers (and domainers and cyber-squatting, etc).

Basically, in more ways than one, Google's broken and they need to fix it more than they needed to insert scrolling, incoherent Twitter feeds into SERPs.
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