Finding a memorable domain that will help your ranking
I hope you have read my post about finding a good keyword for your niche Adsense website as this article will begin where the other one left off. I trust that you have followed my advice and have found a few good keywords with good R/S ratios and with a fair amount of searches.
As I mentioned earlier I hated doing things that could be automated and I have therefore bought the keyword tool called KeywordElite made by Brad Callen. I won’t go into details about the tool in this series of articles as this is meant for all of you that are just starting out and don’t want to invest any money upfront.
In the initial analysis we found that the keyword HORSE wasn’t a good keyword as competition was rather high and it would take to much initial effort to start ranking highly for that keyword. I’ve therefore investigated the niche a little further using KeywordElite and I found a niche that looks interesting and I believe that we might be able to obtain a fair ranking rather quickly and thereby start making some initial Adsense income.
The niche is Horse Trailers and what I found was a few good keywords that I’ll start to build the niche site around. Here are some stats for you:
The stats above are found using the “allintitle” search feature in Google. What you’ll see is that we have absolutely amazing R/S numbers as well as KEI numbers. Besides that you will see that the amount of searches per month is more than 58,000 from those four keywords alone. If we’re able to obtain a #1 ranking in Google for those keywords we’ll have enough traffic to really make money off the site.
In the column showing you the Adwords CPC (a feature available in KeywordElite) you can see that the amount advertisers pay per click is rather limited. This means that we can’t expect to make much per Adsense click but the numbers can make up for that plus we’ll look into other options than Adsense to make money off the site once we see the traffic coming in.
Now the next thing we’ll need to do is find a domain name (preferably a dot com) for our site and the best thing will be if we can manage to find a site with our main keyword (horse trailer) in it as well as a name that will be easy to remember for our visitors.
You might be thinking: “does it really matter whether our visitors can remember our URL when we’re planning to attract traffic through search engines?). Yes that will be important and for more reasons than one:
1. If the site really starts to take off we might want to make it into a larger scale business and not “just” a niche site making money off Adsense. You will be glad that you took the time to prepare if that happens.
2. If you search for “horse trailer” in Google and number 1 ranking site has an URL called www.1234horseXYZ.com while number 2 ranking site is called www.horsetrailer.com, which one would you click first? Statistics show that people will click the URL that they believe is the most professional site and therefore you’ll need to find a professional looking domain name.
3. Repeat visitors can make up for much more than the initial first time visitors and why settle for 58,000 visitors if you could have 100,000 or 150,000 instead?
To find a suitable domain we have several options and there are a lot of websites that will help us find interesting domain names. The sites I always use are these:
DomainTools
If you have a list of keywords you can enter them in DomainTools search facility and it will instantly tell you whether the domain is available or not. The list of keywords will have to be with hyphens or without spaces. You could try testing: Horsetrailer, Horse-trailer, Usedhorsetrailer, Used-horse-trailer etc.
The tool will help you search .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .us domains for availability. I always recommend sticking with .com or .net domains as they seem more serious.
DomainsBot
If you don’t have a list of keywords or you are out of ideas and need help then DomainsBot will give you some ideas for other domain names. I rarely end up using the suggestions it provides but I always get inspired and usually come up with one on my own. The tool can really be a great help and it’s really fast.
What I normally do is to test the most obvious domains and in this case it would be horsetrailer.com and horsetrailers.com. Both are already taken but that is normally always the case.
Second thing I do depends a little on the niche I am working with but I usually test domains with the following words in either the beginning or the end of the URL:
- pro
- world
- land
- universe
- elite
- instant
- cheap
- review
In this case I found that the domain www.HorseTrailerUniverse.com was free and I went and bought it. If you visit the site you will see that I have already started putting up the site but that it is still a work in progress. The site has not been indexed yet and the first external link to the site is the one I just mentioned.
Where to shop for domains
I always by my domains at www.namecheap.com and they are about $8 per domain per year. That is dirt cheap and we’ll easily make up for those costs with our Adsense income.
Try searching the net for coupons for namecheap domains. The normal prize is $8.88 but you will always be able to find a coupon that will give you a domain for less than $8.
You don’t have to use namecheap and there are lots and lots of places to purchase domains but I just find it to be the best that I have dealt with.
In the next article I’ll show you where you can find good cheap hosting and how to setup the domain to that hosting account.
Hi Mikael,
great two articles! I’m starting with AdSense on my own since one month and it works out pretty well. But I have some questions regarding your research methods:
- In your Excel Table, what are columns KEI and Google Campaigns (Are these AdWord campaigns?)?
- Do you know any other tool than Keyword Elite that gives you an AdWords CPS for a certain keyword?
- Where do you get the ~42.000 searches for “horse trailers”? If I search for this combination on wordtracker I only get 858 searches.
Thanks and keep up the good work!
Hi Benjamin, Thanks for visiting and for asking great question. In answer to your questions:
- KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index and is a measurement developed by WordTracker. It means
“The higher the KEI, the more popular the keywords are, and the less competition they have, which means they have a better chance of getting to the top.”
- I know there are many tools out there but I started out using Keyword Elite and it works so well that I haven’t had to buy any other products.
- The 42k searches for Horse Trailer comes from Overture. Wordtracker will always give you the smallest numbers (I don’t know why) and I always see them being topped by actual traffic. I’m not sure that Overture’s numbers are correct either but if we cut it in half it’ll still be fine.
Hi again,
hm strange, the difference between Overture and Wordtracker might be the time scale they apply it to: Wordtracker=1day, Overture=1week? Who knows…
I found that KEI is calculated like this:
– Results^2/existing pages –
From the result’s range you could learn this:
- 0-10: bad KW
- 10-100: good KW
- 100-400: excellent KW
Is this how you do it as well?
To tell you the truth Benjamin I don’t calculate it at all. KWelite calculates it for me so I just assume that it is correct. But I do agree that KEI’s above 100 are fairly easy to get a top10 ranking for.