Using Search Volume To Select A Domain Name

When I am hand registering a domain name or searching through dropping domains I typically spend a lot of time analyzing search volume based on exact match results from Google. Although this is a good way to look for hidden gems for back order or hand registration there are times that it may be valuable to lower the number of exact searches you may typically search for and reasons it may continue to be something that helps you find a good name for resell to an end user.

We all like to go for the big search volume names because we are hoping for large amounts of traffic from type-ins or hopefully the SEO value we get from having an exact match name. But one thing many people do not realize is that there are certain industries that have quite a bit of competition in the advertiser space, a very limited set of customers, and based on that a very low search volume. But every one of those customers matter. When you have a keyword being searched for 1 million times it may be ok to miss one or two visitors to a competitor but when there are only 100 possible customers per month and the value of the sell can be in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, every single search counts.

I recently picked up several names on drop for just this reason, together they form a network of exact match names in a growing and very lucrative industry where customers are limited but value is high. Where I typically try to not go below a certain number of searches per month for exact match names, in this case the PPC value and advertiser competition shows that a network with decent traffic could be an opportunity for a decent sell to a player in this industry, we are talking less than 1000 searches per month total between the names but all of value. I cannot stress that enough.

At the end of the day we all want lots of traffic but really the amount of traffic and the value of each visitor is determined by the industry being targeted. 100 visitors to a site selling 1 dollar items does not mean much, but 100 customers ending up at a site that could be selling 20 thousand dollars items is  a whole different value.

I know this is nothing earth shattering, but sometimes I think we lose perspective of the real value of traffic and why sometimes low search volume does not mean low value.

Training End Users About Targeted Traffic

One of the benefits of being out with the non-domain investor or tech savvy crowd daily is that I get to educate the small business owner about the value of targeted traffic received through search engines and the value of selecting the right domain name for their business website.

One issue we as domainers and also technology people in general have is the fact we like to speak about the technical aspects of a subject rather than the business and marketing benefits of a subject. It is good to step back at times and think about the customer you are approaching and determining what types of examples or terms they would find useful when trying to understand a subject.  As much as we all like to show off our great knowledge of keyword analysis, link building, domain selection, etc at the end of the day the only thing the customer cares about is what will it do for me and how does that translate into DOLLARS in my bank account.

Let me give you an example, I had recently been working with a customer who happens to be a large commercial real estate group in Missouri.  Since we as a company do more than just offer ads on Missouri.me we were speaking to the customer about various options around our services and an interesting discussion came up about one of their current advertising partners who they were spending thousands of dollars a month with, after speaking a bit further with the manager in charge of this decision it was fairly obvious this person had purchased this advertising based on one thing and one thing only, the fact that their advertising partner had millions of hits a day. Now keep in mind, we were not even talking about advertising at this point as something we were offering, we were talking other services.  Based on this little bit of information and knowledge we were then able to show why they were paying more than they needed to for traffic that had little chance of converting and had no targeting to the regions  they were located in. Keep in mind this is a  large commercial real estate firm who understands location and useful foot traffic as well as anyone so the next step was for us to tutor them on targeted traffic on the web.

Although I do not want to give all the secrets away, we were then able to use real estate terms to explain that they were paying for traffic that had zero chance of converting for them which they then admitted had been their worst performing advertising. We gave examples based on search term analysis, etc of traffic that would convert better for the terms they wanted traffic from, they understood that targeting buyers and not browsers was much more effective. In otherwords, 5 million visitors that do not care about what you are offering does nothing for you, although 20 that are specifically targeted, well, those are much more valuable.

None of the above should be too earth shattering, but when you are targeting end users with your domain sales make sure you think about terms they understand and do not focus on the technical details of what we want them to know. Use terms that make sense to them to tutor them on the value.

Minisites Looking Good After Google Pagerank Update

My Wordpress Minisites and other Minisite types seemed to of fared rather well during this weeks Google Pagerank Update.

Overall the Pagerank results are definitely more positive than negative and with this I have seen an increase in traffic for targeted keywords to many of my minisites. Here are several that came out looking good:

Branson Mo

Port Isabel

Pensacola Beach

Hot Tubs

HotTubs.net did not increase in Google Pagerank but did get a traffic bump this week for ranking well on various related keywords. The rest of the list above went from pagerank 0 or 1 to Pagerank 3.

Overall I have also noticed that many of my sites may of stayed the same on pagerank but keyword driven traffic that I have been fighting for has increased measurably over the past week or so.

Now hoping a few of my newer sites like Math Book,  Cayenne Pepper and Glucomannan start showing even stronger results.

Make sure you check your sites, both in SERPS and Google Pagerank, you might just find good news.