How Important Is Your Domain For SEO?

Have you ever wondered how important your domain name is towards your SEO efforts? There are a lot of small businesses who do not have too much flexibility when it comes to choosing a keyword rich domain. They in general discount the power of domains when it comes to ranking for top search engines. You would think that a sophisticated search engine such as Google wouldn’t pay too much attention just to a domain name. After all, if the content is not there, why even bother ranking a generic web page.

In reality, search engines (especially Google) do pay a lot of attention to your domain and the words in it. It would depend on the market that you want to be involved in as well. For instance, you can’t expect to rank in the top 10 for the word “best credit cards” with the domain bestcreditcards.com. Not unless you go through the extra trouble of optimizing your content and getting links to your domain. The credit card market is so competitive for your domain to pull the weight. But how about “Best HDTVs?” Let’s take a look:

As you can tell from the highlighted words in the domains above, your keywords in your domains does matter. And it gets better. In many less competitive market, your domain name can be a big difference maker. I have seen it in action in many smaller markets. All you need to do is have the right keywords in your domain, and you get ranked in the first couple of pages. Maybe Google is being too lenient or maybe it’s a big part of the algorithm. Either way, I recommend every small business owner to acquire these “key” domains even if you are not planning on using them. You never know when they become handy. Of course, you can always formulate a content strategy and build niche specific portals with your domains, but that’s a whole other story.

Registering a domain is just too easy these days. There was a time that you had to pay a lot of money to register a single domain. But these days you can get one for $9 or so. The sooner you start getting into the business of long-tail domains, the better off you are. There is no guarantee for how long Google gives a special attention to keyword rich domains, but the strategy does work for now. And it’s not as if you will be stuck with your domains for life. Your domain does matter. So start registering the good ones before others do.