Domain names, misspellings and SEO

Buying a keyword rich domain can give you an incredible boost in the rankings without having to do very much at all.

By way of a quite recent example, I built a website on WordPress one Sunday afternoon in mid-February for a friend so she could talk about her favourite topics, food and mood. It’s www.completenutrition.com.au and almost as soon as it was indexed by Google, it ranked number one for the (ever-so-reasonably competitive and no prizes for guessing) search term “complete nutrition“.

No links were built to it, no real SEO was performed, but in spite of lots of other websites being quite well optimised for that search term and being very well established, her new blog took them all out.

Instant search engine traffic right there.

There are literally thousands of examples like this; from https://www.birthdaycakes.com.au to https://www.laptopbags.com.au all enjoying number one positions at Google for those search terms (and presumably a truck load of targeted traffic).

There are many other benefits to buying keyword rich domain names. They can protect your own ranking positions, so for example if you already rank highly for popular search terms, it might pay to buy the keyword rich domain names to stop someone else buying them and suddenly out ranking you.

They can also be valuable. There are lots of examples where popular, keyword rich domains have sold for many thousands of dollars. Not a bad investment really.

The other thing that often gets overlooked (and this is a bit leftfield) is the concept of buying keyword rich domains with misspellings to get rankings and traffic.

Here’s a screenshot of estimated monthly traffic from February for a common misspell of the word “jewellery”.

Obviously if you put up a website you need to be a bit careful not to look like a silly, typo-challenged loser! But you could have some fun with it, get some traffic and try and point some of it to your main site.

If you run a blog, you can be a little cheeky and optimise it further (for misspellings) by adding comments using the misspellings you’re targeting, because then it’s not ‘you’ it’s your ‘visitors’!

Obviously a lot of domains have already been taken, but if there’s a long tail key phrase that’s driving traffic and strong revenue to your site either organically or through AdWords, you should think about buying it. Put up a cheap as chips website to get people through to your ‘real’ store through some content and links.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.