Here is part two of the “Developing A Geo Domain” article taken right from October’s edition of Domainer’s Magazine. You can catch the first part of the series here if you missed it.
Developing a Geo Domain
As mentioned earlier, Geo domains usually receive less direct navigation traffic than generic domains. Thus, extensive development is necessary to capture a wider traffic base. It’s important to focus on every aspect of development from appropriate branding to SEO. A thousand pages of content posted with no regard to keyword analytics will cost a lot of money but bring little discernible benefit. Neglecting to research competition and market value before development can also mean thousands of dollars down the drain.
Just choosing where to start requires careful study and analysis of a number of factors.
Geo Domain Name Selection
The selection of a Geo domain or Geo domains to develop is crucial. An intuitive Geo domain name is valuable as it will save you a lot of SEO dollars. Although most of the pure Geo domains are already taken, chances are, you’ll still be able to find a lot of non-pure combos relating to industries and service. Don’t get carried away though. Remember that without development, Geo domains generally don‘t pay for themselves. While the right combination of a place’s name and keyword will contribute to your success, the relevance you build with content you put on it matter more in the long run.
For Geo domain-industry type considerations, take the time to do research. Determine if there’s big enough potential in the region you’re targeting.
Your Geo domain should be memorable like ChicagoEvents.com or CaliforniaDoctors.com. As with other domain properties, the shorter the name, the better. Try to avoid domains with hyphens and dashes. As always, go for the .com variant.
Ideally, Geo domains should reflect the character of the region. The most popular and profitable businesses in a state, country or city are also the most profitable niche for Geo domains. Hawaii.com, naturally, is a tourism-oriented site. If you can’t get the pure Geo domain, go for a relevant non-pure Geo domain like HawaiiBeaches.com, HawaiiHotels.com, HawaiiResorts.com, etc.
A good way to find some Geo domain variations is to perform an internet search on the city, state or country. The top-ranking search results will most likely reflect the most sought-after information about the place. If the city government site is on the top result, check it out and see what it says about the city. If a university site is on the top of the search result, then most likely a Geo domain focused on colleges and universities in that area will yield great traffic.
You can also use other tools such as the Google keyword tool to determine the type of searches being done according to a particular country, state or city. This will give you an idea on the niche industry to target in your place of choice, and it will yield great keywords to use for optimization.
Content Selection
Successful Geo domains provide their target audiences with relevant information as well as useful services. Here are some more suggestions to think about in the course of development:
Tourism Info
If you have a Geo domain that corresponds to a popular tourist destination, tourism information is the natural choice of content for your site. You should post information-rich articles about the place’s tourist attractions, flight schedules, train schedules, maps, hotels, car rental companies, museums, restaurants, and all other pertinent information that are guaranteed to be tourist traffic magnets.
Local Business Guides and Classifieds
Study your Geo domain’s audience. If the people who are searching your target place online are mainly locals and if your target place is not a popular tourist destination, you will find it more profitable to develop your Geo domain into a local business guide and classified ads portal. If resources permit, you can upgrade your Geo domain into a consumer-driven, business-feedback site where people can interact and rate local products, businesses or services.
Even if your target location is popular among tourists, adding a section on local business guides and classifieds can only be a good move as it will give your site a share of both tourist and native audiences.
Useful Widgets and Site Services
You can install useful widgets and services in your Geo domain site. These should enhance your site visitors’ experience and make them want to come back. You can include interactive local maps (e.g. Google maps), hotel online reservation utilities, online ticket processing, real-time local weather updates, etc.
The possibilities are vast. You can partner up with local businesses so that, on your site, people can just click on links and input the needed information to have their laundry picked up, to pay their utility bills, to set an appointment with a doctor, etc. This should make your site very useful to your target audience, increasing your site’s referral rates as well as return traffic.
Local News
Geo domains are perfect as local news portals. You can partner up with local online newspapers or bloggers to fill your site with local news and stories. You can also do everything in-house. You can start your own local publication online and hire professional journalists to focus on certain news about your target locality. Once again, this will require more time (and probably money, unless you’re prepared to write content), but this step adds even more legitimacy to the venture and shows the community that you’re not a fly-by-night operation.
Poll
A poll is a great way to gain insight on what your site’s traffic wants to see in your site. This will provide you with valuable feedback from your audience on which you can base future development directions.
Make sure to check back tomorrow for part 3 of this 5 part series.
“As always, go for the .com variant.” Why, if (from the 1st article) “geo domains typically have little to no type-in traffic”? Surely with the right development and SEO the tld is irrelevant? Anyone have any thoughts about tlds in geo domain development (I’m thinking alternative gTLDs rather than ccTLDS)?
Interesting series, Chef – looking forward to the next few!
@ Martin
I would not agree with the statement “geo domains typically have little to no type-in traffic”. Now, if it were some obscure town that very few know about I might agree. Names like Paris.com, Nashville.com and other “globally” recognizable “words” get lots of direct traffic. That traffic is VERY valuable.
The reasoning behind using “dot com” comes more from direct navigation. Try using Safari, Opera or Foxfire and put in a word in the URL without an extension and it resolves to dot com. That is also VERY valuable.
Lastly, “dot com” is mostly built out (developed) in regards to popular words and names, so the public can simply put in a recognizable “word”.com into the URL and get a good result, which also promotes direct navigation. That understanding has taken 15 years to create.
Dot Com is not a very good sounding TLD but it is accepted to represent THE address for the internet across most of the globe. How long will that take for another extension to muster? ccTLDs are also a good choice IF you reside in those countries. Many nations hold dear their country codes as personal interest and may not want an out-of-country code. ccTLDs with category killer names are great investments IF you plan to sell or flip them in the near future. One never knows what a country may change in regards to who should own them or how to use them. ccTLDs are a risk for the long term in my opinion if you do not reside in the country and do not have a business built on that domain name.
“As always, go for the .com variant.” Why, if (from the 1st article) “geo domains typically have little to no type-in traffic”? Surely with the right development and SEO the tld is irrelevant? Anyone have any thoughts about tlds in geo domain development (I’m thinking alternative gTLDs rather than ccTLDS)?”
I am sure that I am a bit biased but I have to agree with Martin (at least regarding the main 4 gTLDs for the US)
I am getting to the point that I think when people say “always buy .com” that they are just repeating what they have been told over and over again.
A geo .org, a geo .net, a geo .us, in the end whether your site is successful or not is all about what you do with it.
For example, take Atlanta.com and Atlanta.net. the .com is owned by Skip Hoagland and has a fuly developed site but the .net is the main site for Atlanta, GA, not Skip’s .com.
Compete #’s show Atlanta.net with as many as 150,000 viewers per month and Atlanta.com with 40,000 at the most.
I think we are finally getting to a point where we can start to say, “sure, the extension makes a difference, but in the end the extension will not ever make a successful site”.
In defense of the extension I can say that I would never plan to develop anything that is not a major extension simply due to the lack of influence in the SE’s. People can say what they want but I am convinced that a .com or .org will outrank a .cm, .tv or .me anyday of the week and for that reason alone I will stick to the main 4, .com, .net, .org and perhaps .us (in the US).
But all things the same I think you can build a kick A** geo site on a .org or a .net and outperform a .com with a better business idea.
Michael,
I would respectfully defer to you, an individual that has already done what I am in the process of trying to do, but regarding where you said…
“The reasoning behind using “dot com” comes more from direct navigation. Try using Safari, Opera or Foxfire and put in a word in the URL without an extension and it resolves to dot com. That is also VERY valuable.”
How much longer is this going to be the case. It is only a matter of time until all browsers have a built in functionality that takes viewers to a page of links when they neglect to type an extension. In the end the money will go to the browsers, not domain owners.
I still feel, and I am sure that you agree, that the best thing that one can do is build a good business on the domain. I just think that it can be almost as good on a .org as a .com.
@ Free Domain Newsletter
My reasoning about dot com comes mostly from a “feeling” that it empowers people. Having the ability to connect with someone, be it a friend/buyer/seller/investor without any obstacles or barriers is profound. Not in the history of mankind has someone/anyone had so much power. Now this is what the future holds. That one little extension has unleashed more power then most of the last 100 years tycoons’ could have imagined. We are seeing their power diminish daily and rightly so.
Why would we want to let someone get in between us again? Do not let a browser/telecommunication/platform/intranet tell us where and how to go. That was the past. We now hold all the keys.
patrick- great post and very helpful..i like these type of posts by you and offering help, insight.. very good!
protecting your investments in the .com area
think its obvious .me, .tv, country codes are doing well…
yes .com is king, i would hate to be a .com geo owner 5 years from now..
Not true if you’re talking about a primary Geo like Nashville.com, Palm,Springs.com or Acapulco.com: “As mentioned earlier, Geo domains usually receive less direct navigation traffic than generic domains.”
Interesting post but what I don’t think dot com is the only way to go for a GEO, I recently saw dot me geo doing fine as a business. it belongs to Bruce Marler from LOCATEK and to be honest as a end user or a company I like bettre the .me website than the .com
I also plan to develop my dot me geo but not before next year. What is important it’s not just SEO but branding like top 10 internet tech companies (facebook, yahoo, twitter…). Do you think they care about SEO? not really because this is real business and not minisite or adsense parked pages. Real business is all about branding, contents and marketing then SEO is naturally done by others (when you are sucessfull your site will have quality incoming links)
So .com or else all is about branding, conten and marketing, the only positive for a .com is that it’s universal tld.
Whoa, both the Castello brothers in here chatting. I’m definitely not getting into this conversation, lol.
The magazine article overall is really good. Does it have a few flaws like type in traffic, yes. Hopefully over the next few days as it unfolds it will give a good overall guide to Geo domain investing.
I agree with Michael’s point as to the overall affect on the .com extension to the average American in particular.
Sometimes, we have to step back and remember that as domain investors and/or developers…we understand where there are advantages in other extensions.
However, to just use America as an example, the average American still overwhelmingly identifies the Internet with .com. Investing in a geodomain dot com is less about direct navigation and more about securing the best brand with which to develop your business.
Does this mean you can’t build a solid site on something other than .com…not at all. You certainly can, but you have a much better opportunity for long-term success, in my opinion, with a city.com or any kind of geodomain .com.
“However, to just use America as an example, the average American still overwhelmingly identifies the Internet with .com”
Of course the average American identifies the internet with .com but the average American identifies Failblog.org with .org, Wikipedia.org with .org, ImageShack.us with .us. My point is that in the end it is all about branding your website and that can be done with any extension.
Being a .com developer was an adventure, just like being a Christian used to be an adventure when Christ was a cow boy.
Personally, I think .tv, .biz etc.. open some exciting branding opportunities to entrepreneurs on a budget.
The web has entered a less boring era. Non-.Com extensions now offer new adventures. There will be more passinate people willing to take the road less travelled and seek unproven success IMO.
As I stated in my previous comment, non .com extensions can yield solid sites and, indeed, successful businesses. But they require a greater effort in branding and resources in order to compete with a .com in the same space.
There are situations where I would even advocate building a city Geo on a non .com extension.
For example, let’s say there is a small city of say 20,000 people. You would like to build a website for this city, but the city leaders had the foresight to buy the city.com (this happens much less than you may expect), but you can either hand register (not likely) or buy (a better bet) the .net. In my opinion, that would be a solid avenue to build a Geo on an extension other than .com…speaking of cities in the U.S. of course.
Great article – thanks very much for acquiring it.
If the .com isn’t available (either because it’s too expensive or already being used) another extension can be used to good effect – but it’s a lot of work.
We’ve launched a .info for a UK county (pop 780,000) in the last year starting with a lot of community pages linking to local groups (sports, arts, charities etc) and with a lot of information about the area – chasing long tail search terms.
This has worked well. With proper on page SEO and some good quality links, we ranked very well within 1 year for many geo+keyword items. This built an audience which is growing rapidly.
We’re now able to compete better for more competetive terms and so the emphasis of the site is starting to change to more commercial terms (hotels, jobs, businesses and services).
The .com would have been great for branding, but a non .com can be made to generate an audience which can bear fruit if a medium term development and promotion strategy is used.
Having a keyword rich domain name can definitely assist in your ranking efforts, this will help in the linking back of anchor text to your web site. Unfortunately most of the keyword rich domain names have been taken, so that means you need to find an alternative keyword rich domain name or find a way to use your keywords while still making it easy for people to find you.
Yes, .com’s should be your first preference when buying your desired domain name, but if thats already taken, definitely still grab the .org or .net. Dont just give up on that domain name due to the .com not being available. Once the site is developed, Tld’s become irrelevant.
Now I have a quick question.
Most domain developers know that Google gives a very healthy exact match bonus to domains that exactly match the search query. Obviously due to the fact that Google views the domain as the brand and authority of that search term.
My question is, when targeting local businesses e.g. “Sydney Limo Hire”. What domain should I target? sydneylimohire.com or limohiresydney.com.
Its obvious that sydneylimohire.com sounds much better, BUT…
Through my research, people searching on Goog for local businesses always type in the service before the location, e.g. “limo Hire Sydney”, an average of 5 times more searches.
Since the exact match bonus is so prevalent in Google, im very tempted to stick to the higher searched exact match domain rather than the better sounding domain.
I hate choosing so i might have to buy both.
Aaron,
I’d buy both if the cost was right. If not I’d probably go with the LocationService.com. I know it the less searched of the two but I also have to worry about branding. I think that one sounds better.