Michelle Adams

Domain Name Case Study Results

Posted on 15. May, 2009 by Michelle in Niche Marketing

In my last post I mentioned that I’d  conducted a case study on the use of keywords in domain names and today I’m publishing the results of that study for my blog readers.

This case study is focused on a niche I’m targeting in the TTC market. The majority of you probably don’t have a clue what the heck TTC stands for but it’s a market I highly recommend you get into! TTC stands for trying to conceive. This is a huge market that is so hungry, individuals will pay up to $100,000 to solve their problem! ($100,000 is what it can cost to go through numerous IVF cycles.) But I digress!

The niche keyword phrase I was, and still am targeting is: getting pregnant fast. This phrase doesn’t have a million searches a month, however it is a highly specific long tail phrase that drives targeted prospects to my sites.

The most significant area of interest at least for me is that I have two sites targeting this keyword phrase. On one site I’ve used the exact keyword phrase as the domain name and the other site’s domain name contains three words but only two of them are derived from the targeted keyword phrase with optimization focused within the blog pages.

Let’s first focus on the site with the keyword rich domain name, www.GettingPregnantFast.org.  I started this blog in September 2008 making it almost eight months old. Please click on the images to enlarge and click your back button to return to the post.

The site has around 85 backlinks and was social bookmarked to around 15 sites. Other than a couple of articles I ran through an article submitter and a couple of classified ads the site has not been marketed.

Of the average 700 visits Google sends to the site each month, over 200 of them are via the targeted keyword phrase. 200 might not sound like a lot but it is when you know just how targeted those visitors are.

So how have Google rewarded this site in terms of ranking in the search results? Well for all its wonderful original content within 18 posts which have not been updated since early December, the site is today ranking in position 2. Below are some screen shots of Google’s March and April keyword ranking stats which show the average ranking to be position 4.

We know that toolbar page rank isn’t the best method to determine whether you can outrank a site or not however it can be a nice surprise to take over sites that range from PR0 to PR4. Oh except when one of those other sites is your own. And that brings me to the other site I have targeting the exact same phrase. The root domain for this site is a squeeze page which is a static html page and the main action is on the blog which is installed on WordPress. You can check it out at the following link. www.AboutGettingPregnant.com/blog

I started this blog back in June 2008. At first I didn’t really focus on on-site optimization, I was too busy tidying up the sales page, autoresponder series and so on for the ebook that ties into both of these blogs. So I decided to try and funnel some targeted traffic to this blog too and expected it to rank easily for the phrase: getting pregnant fast. I started targeting this phrase shortly after I built the experimental keyword rich domain site.

This site has approximately 190 backlinks, which isn’t many, but more than double my other getting pregnant blog mentioned above. This blog has had a little more marketing thrown its way than the newer blog.

Out of the monthly average of 900 visits that Google search sends to the site, only around 100 are via the targeted keyword phrase: getting pregnant fast. Less than half of the newer blog.

So how has this site fared in the fight for a position on the front page of Google. Well with a PR1 finally awarded I had high hopes that this blog would blast its way to the number one position, joking. There is a reasonable amount of content on this site, it attracts comments and is approximately three months older than the .org blog. Well Google have spoken and relegated this site to position 10 today. Below are the Google stats for March and April which show an average of position 7.

Below are some recent screen shots of search results in both Yahoo and Google in that order.

Okay so there it is, a whole lot of data that is made slightly more interesting given I was able to study two sites in depth rather than just one.

Domain name keywords, do they matter? Well trying to find a conclusive answer is virtually impossible. There are surely a great deal of variables that have resulted in the keyword rich domain outranking not only my own site, but the other 11.5 million sites that mention this phrase in their content. But do I conclude that the domain name has helped in some way? Yes!

For my niche markets I will go after a keyword rich domain every time and if I can’t get one I’ll move on to another niche phrase. This is not my only example but it’s the only one I’m willing to delve into here. Believe me when I say you can use a keyword rich domain name to help rank for long tail phrases that have much more search volume than this little example. Be aware though that there is more to niche marketing than a keyword rich domain!

Would you choose a keyword rich domain for your niche marketing even if it had to be a .org?

Update: I’ve since sold both of these getting pregnant businesses.

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Tags: domain name, domain name keywords, Niche Marketing