Geographic domain names are enjoying the rising tide of localization.
I’m writing today from the Atlanta suburb of Buckhead. Buckhead is the world’s most expensive neighborhood. Well, in domain name terms, that is. The domain name Buckhead.com sold for $250,000 this year. $250,000 seems like what someone would pay for a city name, not a neighborhood.
But geographic domain names continue to ride the rising tide of localization. How many times you have you heard about local search over the past year?
At first this seems counterintuitive. The internet is global. Why would someone want a domain that applies to only a small percentage of the world, not a generic word that people in every city might search for?
I recently purchased the domain of a small Austin suburb for $5,200. A traditional pay-per-click domain buyer would laugh at the price and say it’s too high. After all, the domain only gets about 10 hits per day. But this small suburb of 10,000 people is growing quickly. It should nearly double in population over the next five years. And it’s affluent. There are at least a dozen home builders in the suburb selling their share of nearly a thousand lots. If you were one of those developers, wouldn’t you pay $5,000 for just one lead that resulted in a sale?
The price of a city name is probably out of your reach. There’s no way I could buy Austin.com. But you can still join the rising tide of geo domains by buying neighborhoods, suburbs, and small cities.
If you want to learn more about geo domains, check out Associated Cities.
yowza says
Even better than geo areas…zip code domains. Short, sweet, easy to remember and will fit on a license plate.
Rob Sequin says
Love geodomains but only have .info and .tv and some .mobi. The .com were gone long ago.
I play the geos in Cuba waiting for THE DAY when Castro dies and we can all go to Cuba on vacation.
You say geodomains rise in value. Do you have sales examples?
Floyd says
Zip codes are being snapped up quite fast too. Maybe we should concentrate on international names and codes?
Pete says
I tend to search the city and state and not just the city – sorry Associated Cities . And just cityname.com doesnt have much zing if your a real estate company. You need to have citynamerealestate.com to stand out. I have noticed a big drop in Geo domains on tdnam.com lately.
Editor says
Pete, I’m going to disagree with you. I’d much rather have Chicago.com than ChicagoIllinois.com. And if I were a real estate agent with Chicago.com instead of ChicagoRealEstate.com? I’d be minting money!
Pete says
Editor:
Geo domains are king I agree.
Industry specific geo domains get high placement in the search engines – Google. If you have company site up and running you will be near the top of the searches with geo industry domains names. Save those thousands of dollars paying high SEO fees and buy goe industry relatated domains!
Fred “Mr. Scottsdale” paid big bucks for scottsdale.com – though he’s #10 for the key word google search for “Scottsdale window cleaning”.
I own scottsdalewindowcleaning.com and am #1 he shows up at #10.
I also own scottsdalemaid.com and show up #10 in Google. Scottsdale.com is shows up at #36!
My point is that yes Geo is king – though if you are in any sort of business you better buy your geo specific industry domain name right now.
If you have a parked domain you will not see these dramatic results.
I would suggest that “Mr Scottsdale” and the rest of thes Geo domain boys buy up Geo industry specific domains before I do! Snooze you loose.
Editor says
You’ll get the “free” type-in traffic with Scottsdale.com and the search traffic with the targeted domains you own.