It’s no secret that having a keyword or 2 in your domain name can have an impact on your rankings. In fact, in some cases it’s difficult to see any other reason why a site may rank; with the exception of their spam-keyword-keyword.com domain name. But I’m going to present a few reasons why you shouldn’t change your domain name simply because you want to rank for a search term.
1. Brand is King
In the world of SEO, we always say “content is king.” But in the world of business, brand is king. Well, maybe not “king,” but it’s pretty important. And one of the ways in which you help to promote and protect your brand is through the use of your website, on your branded domain name.
If you’re marketing your business in any other fashion, you will undoubtedly get links to your site as a result (think: press releases, events, etc.); and if a recipient of your marketing efforts should decide to research your company online, they will likely search for (or “Google”) your company’s name, not a specific keyword.
Even if your site does rank at the top for the search, it’s placed in the same category as the others on the search engine’s results page (SERP). Instead, wouldn’t it be better to have a domain name that would allow searchers to easily identify your official site?
2. It’s not that big of an SEO deal
It’s really not that big of a deal to have your keywords in the domain name. We like to get them in there if we can do so without taking away from the integrity of the brand, but we don’t stress it. And we don’t stress it because it really isn’t that big of a determining factor. Sure, it will get a lot of sites to rank, but not usually out-ranking sites that focus more on the quality of their site and Internet marketing efforts.
It’s hard to believe that when you’re staring at some competitor with a spammed domain name out-ranking you. But let me set your mind at ease with a secret number.
100%. That’s the amount of clients we’ve had that faced some competitor out there with a spammy domain name. It’s almost guaranteed that there is someone out there, no matter the niche, that has decided to create a site to rank. And there’s another number too.
100%. That’s the average amount of times it didn’t matter in the end. Our clients still ranked, still received great traffic and they didn’t have to sacrifice their brand integrity.
I’m not bragging about our work (well, maybe a little); rather explaining that a quality campaign will out-perform rank-quick tactics. Besides, the sites that do that usually (but not always) implement other corner-cutting techniques that end up hurting their rankings.
3. It’s on the chopping block
Google is well aware that they are giving too much weight to domains with keywords in them. And they are aware that this is a weakness in their ranking results. And when Google identifies a weakness in their system, especially one that threatens the quality of their results they attack it.
Google’s own Matt Cutts recently posted a video on the subject, mentioning that they will be looking at that aspect of ranking determination:
Matt Cutts – How important is it to have keywords in a domain name?
How long it will be before we see a “fix” is anyone’s guess, but it’s coming.
4. It’s not worth losing gained ground
New sites can be a pain to rank. New site’s start at 0 inbound links, and what links you can get in a few months still have to age before they fully impact rankings. It’s simply not worth losing the links to your current site, the pages that are already indexed, and referrals you may have.
And if you’re argument is
“We can just redirect the old site to the new”
you have to remember that 301 redirects do not pass 100% of their value. Instead, it is degraded a little when passing through that redirect. Link-building is tricky enough as it is; only getting 80% of the returns that you could be getting is just plain silly.
What if I have to change my domain name for another reason?
There are cases in which you simply don’t have a choice but to get a new domain name. When that’s the case, you’ll want to stay tuned as we are writing a solution to that problem for release this week.