How Search Rankings Boost Domain Name Sales
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
Getting your domain names in search engines boosts chances for selling to end users.
I’ve written before about how I am using Octane360 to monetize a number of my long tail geo domains (e.g. cityAllergist.com). In addition to creating a new revenue stream on my domain names in the form of directory listing sales, there’s another benefit to creating web sites using Octane360 and similar site building systems: it helps you sell your domain names.
How often does someone contact you from your domain name “inquire about this domain” link and submit an offer on your domain? It probably happens a lot. But those visitors generally find your domain by typing it in; they had to have thought about it first.
Now, imagine you can get your domain name ranked on the first page of Google for your exact match term. Let’s choose a domain I don’t own, AustinLawyer.com. If you’re ranked for “Austin Lawyer”, you’re going to get a lot of visits. Some of those visitors will be lawyers in Austin checking on their search rankings. If they click through to your web site and see a “for sale” message, you’ve just found a prospective buyer that otherwise wouldn’t have thought to buy your domain name.
Just this week I sold one of my sites hosted on Octane to an end user. The site was perfect for him; and he said the search rankings were a big reason for his interest. I also had an easy benchmark for a price. I offered to sell it to him for a multiple of the monthly cost to purchase a directory listing on the site. It was a no-brainer for him and a fair deal for me. I have another sale pending — again, where the buyer became aware of the domain name thanks to a Google search.
Further Reading:
The domains I have with ppc pages have lost all listings with Google and Yahoo.
And G & Y pays so poorly even when viewers click on links, it is time to throw in the towel and do something different with the domains.
This is one of the options I’m considering.
I have not used Octane360, but I can back you up about getting ranked for the matching search term of your domain and end users finding it that way with a little bit of development!
Congrats on the sales.
If you sell the website at the beginning of the development cycle, do you think you might be selling too quickly?
I also understand the principle of selling when you have a “live one”. We never know when another buyer might come along.
@ domain novice – if I were investing significantly in development, perhaps. But these are cases of simple directory sites pulling good search rankings. The buyer isn’t buying it based on traffic numbers, but instead on search rankings.
>>>> But these are cases of simple directory sites pulling good search rankings. <<<<
Can you provide examples ? Thanks
I have had the same effect with WhyPark. It is much easier to validate a higher price on the domain with a little PR and organic non-type in traffic.
I checked some of my SmartName ecomm stores tonight and 22 of them are on the front page of google for the exact keyword search. I guess any type of development whether it’s octane, smartname, why park etc… besides normal parking seems to gives you a boost
This is just what we are doing with our portfolio of good domain names. They have value in the name itself, however, when we get them to a first page ranking the value should go up ten fold.
I would think getting on google’s front page is most effective with –
1. WhyPark then
2. Octane because of the geo/niche marketing
3. Smartnames
I assume Google and Yahoo applies a negative de-merit towards smartnames because they know most are ppc sites. So, the search bot needs to be more convinced that it is a original content or shopping page rather than a link page.
Whereas, the bot knows that the whypark and octane dns is going strictly towards a content page.