KEY DOMAINS
What Is a Keyword Domain Name?
Keyword domain names are domains that you own in addition to your primary domain. In other words, keyword domain names target specific local, national and international search terms to drive more traffic to your website or business.
Businesses use keyword domain names, including exact domain match and partial match, to increase leads from search engine pages. However, keyword domain names aren’t silver bullets. There are right and wrong ways to go about using them. If you want to avoid any search engine punishments, make sure you’re using keyword domain names correctly.
How Keyword Domain Names Work
Using keyword domain names to generate website leads does not mean you’re changing your primary domain name or the name of your business. Instead, you register additional keyword domain names and forward the traffic to your website using 301 redirects.
For example, let’s say you own a bakery called The Cake King, and you sell both vegan and non vegan cakes. Your primary domain name might be cakeking.com. Let's say you want to drive more local traffic to your website from people searching for vegan cakes. You might register the keyword domain vegancakes.com and forward the traffic to your main website.
This additional domain targets a specific segment of your audience: vegans. Your primary domain name might not be optimized for “vegan cakes”, but your keyword domain name allows you to rank higher.
Domain Names And SEO Ranking
Your domain name is only one of many factors that affect your SEO rank. Search engines analyze various factors to find websites that provide the most relevant information and best user experience. Domain names are not a top factor in your SEO ranking, but they are still significant. On one hand, targeted keywords can help increase your search relevancy, but on the other hand, over optimized domain names might look spammy and rank lower.
This is why you must follow SEO best practices for your primary domain name and when using additional keyword domain names. Keep domain names short, memorable, relevant and directing searchers to unique high quality content websites. Additionally, you want to avoid using confusing spelling or hyphens.