Let’s see… in the past 12 months there have been at least 4 or 5 internet marketing products extolling the virtues of “exact match domains”.
You know, sites like “DysonDC25.net” or “YogaMat101.com”, etc.
The theory goes that having the keyword in the actual domain name is a significant ranking factor and knowing this can be the key to untold riches and fame.
OK… this makes sense enough. There’s a theory that putting the keywords in the domain is a good thing. And common sense would tell us that if someone wanted to buy a yoga mat and saw “yogamats.com” or “yogamatcentral.com” in the top 3 listings on Google or Bing they’d be inclined to click.
So we have a ranking benefit and a message-to-market match. Coolness.
But let’s peel the onion a little…
How significant of a ranking factor is this? I mean, can you rank for a term doing NOTHING other than having the keyword in the domain name? Sure – when there’s next to no competition.
But what about overall? What if we tested a lot of keywords… checked out their SERPS — the top 10 listings in Google say — and saw whether the domains that ranked had the keyword phrase in it.
Pretty good test don’t you think? Well, Tim Godfrey of Mining Money Online fame (one of my favorite free internet marketing courses) did just this.
Tim took 5 million keywords (yes.. MILLION), captured the top 10 rankings in Google and then checked if the keyword was in the domain name.
Better yet, these were keywords that came from his private database of “good” keyword terms — keywords with medium to low competition and medium to high value.
OK… 5 million keywords… 50 million domains to sift through.
Guess what?
We wanted to see if analyzing some pretty massive amounts of data would support our observations. We looked at over 5 million keywords from our IMeye database, and we looked at the top 10 domains in the search engine listings for each. Here’s what we found:
- only 5% of the keywords had a domain in the top 10 with the keyword phrase in it
- only 5% of the keywords had a domain in the top 10 that was an exact match
Conclusions? keyword in the domain is not really all that important, as 95% of the time, they don’t even make it into the top 10. In addition, exact match domains don’t appear to be any “stronger” than simply having the keyword phrase in the domain name. (source: http://theimblueprint.com/does-having-the-keyword-phrase-in-the-domain-really-matter-not-so-much/#more-147)
Again, if there is little to no competition for a keyword (and of course — if the keyword has value) then using the exact match domain helps with ranking. But it isn’t clear even in this case if just doing an ezinearticle or a few blog posts is any better or worse.
Bottom line – pick domain names that have a good market-to-message match and convey information. Don’t sweat the EMD thing too much. At the end of the day compelling content and links are still the secret sauce to traffic and conversion.