Here is the "pitch":
“Buy my domain name for ‘X’ thousands or hundreds of dollars to improve your site optimization?”
Should you pay this much for a domain name?
Basic questions you need to ask and why:
1-Is this domain name important for your branding?
If it is important to your branding, then yes, there has got to be some amount that is worth it to you to pay for the “.com” version of your name. You need to do the cost benefit analysis based on your needs, the importance of your brand relative to the long term potential revenue your site is going to generate for you, and to what degree that revenue will by impacted by your domain name.
2-How will your domain name affect your revenue in terms of SEO?
In a competitive market, a keyword based domain name will not get your site to the top of Google. As I have mentioned before on previous blogs there is no magic bullet for optimization. Your domain name, or more specifically, your URL, should be just one part of your overall optimization strategy.
When you see a site that comes up number one on Google for competitive search terms, it’s because they have a better website from Google’s perspective relative to the search terms used, NOT just because they own the domain name “hotels.com”, or “Lawyers.com”. That is part of it-but in competitive markets it is just a small part of the overall strategy-and it is not necessary.
The site “Lawyers.com” is usually at the top of Google for very competitive search terms like “Lawyer”, “Lawyers”, “Attorney” and “Attorneys”, but mostly for reasons that have to do with site design, site relevancy, the quality and quantity of the content’ how often it is updated, as well as the quantity and quality of the links.
Of course, there are more reasons to have a great domain name besides optimization:
Lawyers.com gets about 25% of its traffic from people just typing in the domain name “lawyers.com” due to the branding efforts through television and the common sense approach to finding a website without utilizing a search engine. However, if you visit a site like lawyers.com, hotels.com, bedandbreakfast.com, or cars.com and have a horrible user experience you will not be back. Investing in a great domain name without investing in a great website can be a big waste of money.
3-Could your domain name affect your Pay Per Click program?
I suppose if your domain name could encourage people to click through to your ad instead of your competitors’ sites, then it could help you save money on PPC. If you have a higher click through rate than others you should pay less than they do per click yet still be above them in the sponsored results.
So how much should you pay for a domain name?
How about 1 million dollars? That’s how much was paid for www.business.com back in the 90s if I remember correctly.
Of course, you could take a different route altogether and just come up with some original but silly name, misspell it, and make billions of dollars.
That’s what the guys who started “Google” did. Did you know the name was supposed to be “Googol”, which was short for the word “Googolplex”. If I remember correctly, Googolplex is the number “1” with a hundred zeros after it.
As the story goes; the founders of Google were picking up their million dollar check from their first investor. The investor wrote the check to “Google” instead of “Googol”. Rather than ask him to write the check again they changed the name of their company.
At least that’s the story I heard and have yet to hear it disputed. Even if it wasn’t true it falls into the category of “If it isn’t true it should be” stories.
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