When I think about choosing a domain name for my website, there are two categories that I place them in :
- a one page domain name or …
- an authority site.
So what’s the difference?
One page domain names
I usually create these types of websites around a single keyword phrase that I have researched in Longtail Pro that has a good volume of searches with an average keyword competition (KC) value of 40 or lower.
The idea here is to rank for JUST that keyword phrase.
So you would ideally pick a domain name that has the exact keyword phrase in it.
For example, if the keyword phrase that you want is “best blue widgets”, then you would see if best-blue-widgets.com is available.
If that is taken then try different variations of the keyword like:
best-bluewidgets.com
bestblue-widgets.com
bestbluewidgets.com
Make sure the extension is a dot com or dot org, because Google ranks these higher.
Some might say that exact match domains or (EMD’s) are useless now that Google has turned down the dial in their algorithm, but my tests show that they still rank fine.
However, be mindful when using this method because it can look a little weird if your domain name has obviously been built to take advantage EMD.
For example : the-best-blue-widgets-in-austin-texas.com
Authority Domain Names (Branding)
These domain names are all about branding, and in a recent video from Google they mentioned that they would rather people think in terms of branding their websites.
So think about picking a domain name that is under 15 characters long.
Unlike the one page domain names this type of domain name can be anything really. Google will figure out what your website is all about based on the content in the website.
I usually go for these types of domain names now, because they are less likely to throw up a red flag for Googles spam detectors.
Any questions leave a comment below.