How To Research A Keyword Geodomain Before You Buy It
To start, this post isn’t about pure geo domains. Those are no-brainers. This post is intended to help you decide if a geo+keyword.com is worth picking up.
Since I found the new Name.com tools I have been doing a lot of mining for geodomains using my trusty Domain Research Tool. There are so many geo+keyword.coms deleting every day, with countless more waiting to be registered. They are littered all over every single site out there.
So how do you tell if you are looking at a winner?
I’m going to leave out things you check for in every domain, such as pagerank, backlinks, indexes, history, etc. That said, there are four main things I look for, other than price, when deciding whether or not to pick up a geo+keyword.com:
- The size of the city/state/whatever. Not just population, but quantity of businesses. City-Data.com can help you here. This is the most obvious and doesn’t really need any further explanation.
- The relation of the keyword to the geo location. Does it fit? Do you want FloridaSnowblowers.com?
- Has it been registered in the other extensions?
- The number of other similar geos that use that same keyword. This is perhaps the most important and the reason why I’m writing this post.
For example: I have a handful of cities and states in the Name.com notification list of deleted names, including “Texas.” If a domain drops with the word “Texas” in it then an email will be sent to me. Yesterday I received a notification that FuelTexas.com deleted and was available to register. I thought it was a pretty good name. But before I pulled the trigger, I wanted to look a little deeper into it.
- Big state, both in size and population. Win.
- Fuel and Texas are almost synonymous. Win.
- It was registered in .TV but the other extensions were available. Lose.
- And finally I ran all 50 states in the DRT with the keyword “Fuel” in front of them. This was going to be the deciding factor in whether I purchased the domain name or not. Unfortunately I found that just 7 Fuel+State.coms were registered. Ouch.
Finding just 7 registered was quite disappointing. I was fully expecting 40+ to be registered. So few means that this simply can’t be much in demand. Still, these two words fit quite well together and since it’s reg fee, it’s worth picking up in my opinion.
Let’s move on to another example. I received an email notification saying that FlightsMichigan.com had deleted and was waiting to be registered. I thought it was a pretty good keyword, so I put it to the test.
- Again, big state both in size and population.
- Not really touristy like Florida or Nevada, but still a great keyword that can be good in any state.
- Again, the .TV was taken but the rest are available.
- Yet another shock: just 12 state.coms have this prefix!
I really thought such a popular keyword would be taken by now. Personally, I prefer geo+keyword.com over keyword+geo.com. It sounds better to me and feels brandable. MichiganFlights.com. Yea, it sounds better. And I’m not the only one that feels this way: running state+flights.com through the DRT… 100% gone. Not a single one is available.
So I decided to look even further into FlightsMichigan.com using one of my favorites: the Google Keyword Tool. “Flights Michigan” has a search volume of 40,500 with some decent advertiser competition. Even further, “Flights Colorado” has 135,000 searches a month and FlightsColorado.com is available! The list of available names are at the bottom of this post.
This is something you should always do before you pickup a geodomain. It’s helped me make purchases many times. There have been a couple instances where I took a keyword and found just 1 or 2 states, or a couple of the top 50 cities that didn’t have the geo+keyword.com registered. Even though there was a time or two where I wasn’t absolutely thrilled with the domains, there is an obvious demand for them.
And remember, none of these are set in stone. This is a guide to help you make a more informed decision. If your gut feeling says to ignore the rules and go for the domain, then by all means do so. I’ve done it myself.
Have fun with these:
flightsalabama.com
flightsarizona.com
flightsarkansas.com
flightscarolina.com
flightsnorthcarolina.com
flightssouthcarolina.com
flightscolorado.com
flightsconnecticut.com
flightsdakota.com
flightsnorthdakota.com
flightssouthdakota.com
flightsdelaware.com
flightsgeorgia.com
flightsidaho.com
flightsillinois.com
flightsindiana.com
flightsiowa.com
flightskentucky.com
flightslouisiana.com
flightsmaine.com
flightsmaryland.com
flightsmassachusetts.com
flightsmichigan.com
flightsminnesota.com
flightsmississippi.com
flightsmissouri.com
flightsmontana.com
flightsnebraska.com
flightsnewhampshire.com
flightsnewjersey.com
flightsnewmexico.com
flightsohio.com
flightsoklahoma.com
flightsoregon.com
flightsrhodeisland.com
flightstexas.com
flightsutah.com
flightsvermont.com
flightsvirginia.com
flightswestvirginia.com
flightswisconsin.com
flightswyoming.com
Oh, and I left FuelTexas.com for someone to reg.
(Something tells me I’ll regret not registering all of these)
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Comments
4 Responses to “How To Research A Keyword Geodomain Before You Buy It”
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Scott,
Good post on Geo Domains, and very considerate of you to leave that domain list for one of your readers. I think you are right, you will probably see it sold as a lot at some future auction.
Glad you made it through the storm. I had both family and friends directly affected as well.
Quick note, if you can, program your active links to open a new window. It’s frustrating to go back and forth, and you don’t want to be losing all your readers.
Keep up the great work.
Jay Lohmann
http://www.InvestInURLs.com
***EDIT***
Hope your family and friends weren’t hit too hard.
I’ve actually debated about the active links myself. I agree with you: I’d rather them open a new window. I don’t have it set to that though due to something I read on a usability site. The site said that you shouldnt force a new window on a reader and that you should allow the reader to choose for themselves whether they want to open it in the same window or a new one. I wasn’t too sure about it, but since I liked a lot of the other things he had to say I took his word for it here.
Glad to hear someone on my side. Perhaps I’ll change the site over. Anyone else feel this way too?
-Scott
Hi Scott,
Great post! These are all very valid considerations when deciding to buy or not.
However, one thing I kind of disagree with (and agree with at the same time) is being concerned with whether the geo-service/product domain is owned in other cities/states by someone else.
On the one hand, it’s preferable from the standpoint of providing confirmation that the vertical is valuable to someone else (and thus, potentially valuable to you). We prefer to think we’re not alone in our valuation estimations, so if someone else has found value in a play, we’re possibly influenced to make that play as well.
However, this is a potentially misleading situation. For example, if another domainer has made a big play on the top 50 most populated cities, that could make someone else interested in buying cities 51-100. But is the first domainer really having success with his 50 names, either through PPC/CPA, other revenue, or sales to end users? Maybe yes, maybe no.
About a year ago, we did a lot of research to find available geo-service domains in areas that we thought were valuable. Like, 700 verticals or more. Of course, all the ones we knew for sure were valuable (TucsonPlumbers.com, for example) were taken. We did find a few cities available in a few verticals that we thought were potentially valuable (InsuranceBrokers, LifeInsuranceAgents).
But then we stumbled upon a space that was totally open, and we jumped on it.
Now, we could be completely wrong and lose our whole investment. But I don’t think so.
What happened was, using Wordtracker we were able to find a great number of local searches being made on the keywords in the domain, but very few domains were owned for the top 200 US cities across the three variations of the vertical that were being searched (singular, plural, and variant noun). Only a few were owned - by END USERS who were already using the geo domains for their businesses. BINGO! We were ahead of the curve (finally), and we jumped in with both feet. We’ve already rejected offers of $800 on three of these domains, as we feel they will be worth $x,xxx per year in advertising or leasing revenue when we get the mass development platform built (kind of like Marchex’s model, with a couple of twists).
Bottom line, this was a somewhat hidden service in the medical field that we knew people were searching for, and that we suspected searchers were direct navigating to. But by a number of the valuation metrics you’ve listed above, they looked like dogs. Happily, we know they aren’t.
Take a look at our portfolio, and about 2 seconds will pass before you figure out which vertical I’m talking about.
9 times out of 10, we use exactly these same valuation considerations (and some others) to decide whether to buy any domain. But for us, there was this “10th time” where we chose to take a different path, and it looks like it will pay off over the long haul.
Thanks again for the post!
Bob Amend
http://www.dkhdomains.com
***EDIT***
Thanks for the insightful comment Bob. And you’re absolutely right. I’ve even run into situations such as this with geo+keyword.coms… and I can sadly admit I kept them…
Bakersfield, CA is approximately 60th largest city in the U.S. with 315k people. It is also the largest city in the U.S. that has these available domain names:
bakersfieldcafe.com
bakersfieldcleaners.com
bakersfieldexpert.com
bakersfieldmechanic.com
bakersfieldmechanics.com
bakersfieldservices.com
(Note, I did this query about 6 months ago and these are still available)
Every single city larger than Bakersfield has these keywords already registered. 60 cities! On top of that, I found many other decent keywords available for Bakersfield:
bakersfieldconsultant.com
bakersfieldconsulting.com
bakersfieldforums.com
bakersfieldgirl.com
bakersfieldguys.com
bakersfieldinvestment.com
bakersfieldlink.com
bakersfieldmen.com
bakersfieldorganic.com
bakersfieldrepair.com
When I saw this trend I thought WOW, I can get in on some good keywords for Bakersfield. Then I thought, why on earth are all these available for this city? I did some Googling and found that this city is not exactly a pleasant place to live in. After my research I had no desire to own a Bakersfield domain name.
So, yes… this doesn’t always hold true and I’ve experienced it myself.
It’s one of those things that holds true most of the time, but not all. Kinda like *I* before *E* except after *C*!
Thanks again!
-Scott
Thanks for the tips, just picked up one.
Jason
You wrote ” …if another domainer has made a big play on the top 50 most populated cities”
- which is exactly what I’ve done on a few occasions, like with “robots”.
On another topic, I made myself a database with the top 600 cities and about 300 generics (dot coms) and got all the whois info for each registered domain and there are fun things to do like seeing which city had 200 generics registered first or which city had the most generics registered on a certain date.
Also, I set up my own search engine so that I can crawl all (200,000) of the geo-generics and find out which ones are parked, which ones have real websites up and then merge that information with the generic popularity for each city to get an idea of which cities should be viewed as “trendsetters”. Then check potential registrations against that city to see if the generic is registered in that city and if it is then is it a real website and if so then look at registering 50 of the next best cities.
***EDIT***
Hi Greg,
I too have such a list. In fact, I probably went a tad too far on the keywords. But you do occasionally find some worth registering.
As for the last paragraph, that is well beyond my skills. And that is the exact type of strategy I envisioned when I came up with this blog: thinking outside the box and mining to spot new trends!
Thanks for the comments!
-Scott