(The Entrepreneur Ridealong) Building A Niche Travel Site From $0 to $350,000: Picking a Domain
Updated on September 6, 2023
Picking Your Domain
What are the most important factors you considered when choosing your domain name for your business?
Exact domain names are actually really important. It’s kind of an old-school strategy to get an exact domain match. Not many people talk about it anymore but it definitely helps because if you get any backlinks or mentions, you’ve got your main keywords getting linked back to your domain. It helps Google understand what your domain’s basically about.
Is there an optimal domain name length?
Since I’m building a travel website I’ve made sure I’ve got the location in the domain name. As far as domain length, generally, all the single-word domains are taken, and a lot of them are not very good for branding and growing in the long term. Generally, a two-word or three-word domain name is better.
You can do a branded first or second word and then the other one would be an exact match for your niche. So mine’s just a branded first term and then the second word is part of the niche. So it’s going to have the keyword in the title.
I’ve seen a lot of websites do very well with exact match, so it’s definitely still a thing. It’s good for people linking back to you and helping people understand where they are and what the site’s about.
What did you try to avoid when choosing a domain name?
I know a lot of people who avoid hyphens, but I think hyphens are fine. I’ve never seen anything wrong with ranking, a few of my sites have hyphens and they do perfectly fine. So I think doing that should be fine.
Stuff to avoid though, I’ve seen domains that are really long, like five, or six words. I generally wouldn’t go that far. In my opinion, it’s three words max but stick to two words if possible.
I also like to use “.com.” domain names, though it depends on who your market is. If it’s more like a techie group of people, you can get away with other domain names, but .coms are seen as trustworthy.
I’ve tried .io and .co and stuff in the past and they do rank fine. I’ve also tried .co.uk, which is perfectly good, being geo-located, but I try to avoid all other domains and just stick to .com and to two-word domains if possible.
How about aged domains?
It’s been really hit-and-miss with aged domains. The domain on this project is an aged domain. I used Spamzilla, which is a tool to quickly check domains and I got it when it was dropping instead of when it was fully expired. So the domain I’m working on now is an aged domain and II’ve left it sitting for five or six months with a little bit of content before actually starting this project to give it a little head start in Google’s eyes.
Google likes age and authority, but my general thoughts in aged domain is that it’s very hit and miss and I do think links expire. So if you get a link from Wikipedia, but that link was 10 years ago, it’s not going to be as strong as a link that you get on Wikipedia a few days ago or a few weeks ago.
You also have to be careful and make sure no one else has used it for a PBN or spam. There are a lot of factors considered with aged domains but it’s a very powerful tool if you do it right.
It looks like most of the other site builders on this ride-along are using an aged domain, which is quite interesting. It’s definitely a way forward. Most of my other sites are new domains that aren’t aged, just because I don’t like the wildness of it.
How much would you be willing to spend on your ideal domain name? In other words, how valuable/crucial do you think a premium domain name is when building a content site?
I just like spending $10- $12 to buy a normal .com domain because there are so many branded words that you can put into Google, like synonyms of X or whatever it is then you just find loads of different variations and different takes of branded words or you could book pro or stuff like that.
I stay away from “best” in the domain name, so it’s not as spammy. I’ve got a few domains like that, but generally, they’re harder to sell and it’s harder to get links to because not many people want us to link to “best vacuums” and stuff like that. They’d rather have more of a branded word.
So when you are looking for the ideal spending on a domain name, you don’t need to spend a lot. There are so many different branded terms or different terms you can use which is fine because then it’s your content that brings the authority to the domain.
I don’t like spending a lot unless it’s going to be a special project and it’s a single-word domain. So for this, I can’t remember how much it cost, but it wasn’t a very expensive one.
That said, I have nothing against paying for premium domain names when it makes sense to. This year I’m going to be building out a very premium site, which is going to be the main site that I will personally look after. That’s a single-word domain that cost me $3,500. This was cheap for what it is because it’s a single word, but still a lot more expensive than most standard domains. Usually, I don’t think it’s too much of a factor though. I think just a two-word domain which you spend $10-$12 is perfect.
