Value of particular domain name as marketing funnel
Hi folks, I am a digital marketing/SEO n00b.
Help me figure out how to put a high-value domain name to good use.
Right now I am using the following domains where brand=startup/product name.
- brand.ai (landing page)
- brand.app (current prototype, eventually the plan is to have product live on app.brand.ai)
But, I have a secondary .dev domain name, which is a high-value common keyword.
So imagine, for example, if the name of my company is Canon, I own Canon.ai and Canon.app. The secondary domain is basically Printers.dev
What's the best way to use Printers.dev to drive traffic to Canon.ai?
Some ideas, I am toying with is possibly some kind of free tool (like an online calculator) or some other form of useful content. Maybe a blog?
Open to all suggestions.
I wouldn't try to overthink it -- a lot of SEO hacks of that gave you an edge no longer work. The value of a domain is in its ease to remember / type / understand -- it's correlation not causation -- but given enough time, legit link building, and quality content, you could make cat.com rank for "printer."
Basic premise of all SEO -- when some one types in a search they are looking for something specific. Google's job is to find that for them. If you provide that, and have a the best reputation for providing that, you will rank.
Reputation is based on both the links linking to you, and the reputation of those linking to you. Plus a quality measure of how well google did (measured by how quickly a user bounces back to search).
Details on how this is implemented and tweaked are deep, complex, and ever changing, but the goal is always the same.
So, if you want lasting value in your SEO/domains, create something of value and relevant for your prospective searcher.
Keyword tools will help you gauge how competitive a set of keywords are, if you want to rank.
At the end of the day though, inbound links from high quality sites are what is gonna matter most (eg. press, or Cannon => printer.dev (or vvs. if you happen to have a hella good reputation for printers). If you have a no rep domain, pointing to a no rep domain , it's not gonna make much difference.
If you are trying to build up that rep from scratch, then make sure the domains are of similar or relevant focus.
Agree with all of this... in fact, cat.com ranks number 1 for the "excavator" keyword.
If you want organic traffic, use keyword tools to find keywords that your app solves. Write articles on how people can solve those problems.
Build a product that people will link to.
Why use a secondary domain? Are you already getting a lot of traffic to the second domain? Just build the product on the domain that is getting traffic.
Building a free tool is a good idea. Make sure it solves a problem people are searching for. Double check and make sure that that keyword actually shows tools in the search results, and not a blog page or ecomm page for instance. Again, put them all on the same domain. More chances of getting a backlink.
If you are able to get a .com with your specific keyword, you can get that type-in traffic potentially, though chances are high that the domain price will be too high to make it worth it. Instead, build a brand.
I still prefer .com domains though. If your brand is strong, I will type in the brand with a .com. Again, not something worth overthinking either.
I found the ahrefs course quite useful for SEO (I'm sure there's a SEMrush version of the course out there somewhere as well):
https://ahrefs.com/academy/blogging-for-business
Strongly agree! From my experince, I try to keep my domains name as simple as possible and focus on value of the websites. No matter how beautifully and correctly your domain is chosen, if you have no value in your product, nothing will matter.
I'm now developing educational platform in the CEA region (not promoting just some details of the industry :) ) and we actually get pretty great organic traffic, not paying to much attention to SEO because of normal copywrite and advertising in other channels.
So I just would advice not to forget about SEO but focus on more crucial things especially in the very beginning.
According to this article, there is no benefit in having a keyword in the TLD
for search engine rankings.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/keywords-in-domain-name/380912/