Domain Registration is an SEO Strategy

Domain Registration is a fairly simple task and with cheap domain registration being pretty much the standard it is absolutely silly not to register your domain if you haven’t already. But what web address do you register? There are really two key strategies that we recommend for your domain name.

Strategy 1 – Your Brand

This one kind of goes without saying that you need to register your brand before someone else does and you wakeup to find out its not available. So register your brand and do so under multiple extensions i.e. .com, .us, .info, etc. As domain registration is so inexpensive you my as well secure them all. If you don’t and your brand becomes the next big thing, you may wake up one day to competition trying to use alternate versions of your domain to rank in the search engines for when your brand is searched. So register multiple and protect your brand asset.

Strategy 2 – Your Top Keyword

How do you find what your looking for today online? Generally if you are like most, then you use a search engines like Google, or YouTube, or even Facebook to find what your searching for. You may take a recommendation from your social media network of friends in the way of a recommended link. However, very rarely will you remember “www.abctireshop.com”, and in fact rather than enter the URL even if you do remember the company name, your likely to search “abc tire shop” if you really remembered the brand name. This is why so many companies with an online presence understand the importance of search engine optimization. To put your search engine optimization results on  steriods, a great strategy is to include it in your domain name. (See our Post on Keyword Research to learn the first steps to this strategy)

The Best of Both Worlds Example:

So for example, lets say your company name is ABC Tires, but you really want to rank for the term “wheel and tire deals” which has a search volume of about 27,000 searches per month as discovered from our keyword research. If available register two domains or some variation of them if they are not available; (1) abctires.com and (2) wheelandtiredeals.com. Establish your website on the www.wheelandtiredeals.com site and point (301 redirect) the abctires.com to the website on www.wheelandtiredeals.com. This way if someone does know your brand end enters your URL, there going to land on your business, but if there just searching for this highly competitive keyword “wheel and tire deals”, your URL will be helping you rank to page 1.

Although the URL is a great component of a quality search engine optimization strategy, it is just one component. The key to the best results is having many components all weighing in to drive your site to the top. Let us know in the comments below your experience around URL’s ability to help websites rank, we’d love to hear what you’ve found.

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