Are exact match domains a good idea?

Transcript:

Hey guys, Nick here from HVAC Business Growth. Thanks very much for watching the show today. In this video what we’re going to do is talk about exact match domains and whether or not they’re a good idea for your business. Let’s get stuck into the video.

All right, so are exact match domains a good idea? First of all, what we need to do is clarify exactly what an exact match domain is. So an exact match domain is where you have a specific keyword that you want to rank for and you include this fully with no extra words or letters in the domain name. So the example we’ve got here is you’re AC repair business in Akron, Ohio and one of the keywords that gets a bit of traffic that might get 200 searches per month and that keyword is AC repair Akron. So you try and go out and get a domain that’s called acrepairakron.com.

So there was a time going back to maybe 2012 where this was a really good idea to do this. Everybody wanted to have an exact match domain. And there was a good reason for it because they were actually easy to rank. There was a time where you could get a domain such as this, you could put up just a bit of content and pretty much it would rank on the first page of Google for that particular key phrase quite quickly. Typically, within a couple of weeks it would rank.

There have since by many changes to Google and they’ve made this quite a fair bit harder to do, so let’s go through why it is or it isn’t a good idea. So obviously this acrepairakron.com example here, it’s a very relevant domain for the search query. So it has that going for it. In other past videos that you may have seen, we’ve spoken a lot about relevance, so having a domain with the keywords in it can actually help you relevance.

But the challenging thing is that it’s really difficult to brand that Google is very much favouring brands at the moment. So if you go through the search engine result pages of a lot of searches, you will see some bigger brand businesses ranking quite well. So part of the why you can build a brand is to get yourself on social media sites, get yourself on directories and business listings and citation sites and those sorts of things. And when you have a keyword rich domain such as this, it’s actually really hard to get those branded profiles out there. So the marketing rules that are out there actually quite strict.

You find it difficult to be able to build a lot of social profiles and listings with a keyword rich domain. So I kind of feel that they have limited use cases. So the recommendation that I’m going to be making is basically it’s a no. They’re not a good idea. They’re for marketers only because they have such a narrow and specific use case. If you were a business starting out, I would just recommend that you build yourself a brand.

If you already had an HVAC business and you already had a website, I wouldn’t bother moving my website to an exact match domain. So hopefully you guys understand. I feel it makes sense. SO just to reiterate, no, exact match domains. They’re not a good idea and they only have really specific use cases. So, hopefully that makes sense. Thanks for watching. See you in the next video.