One thing I look for when buying a domain name is to see how many companies use that exact term as a part of their domain name. If companies are using more specific domain names for their websites, the generic term will usually be highly valuable to at least one company that wants to be THE exact match .com. With this exact match name, you can usually command top dollar.
For example, there are a lot of law firms that use the term “DefenseLawyer.com” in their domain name. You have everything from descriptive names like CriminalDefenseLawyer.com to geographical like NewYorkDefenseLawyer.com and everything else in between. Owning the primary generic term would presumably be of interest to many of those companies. This is generally the case with most exact match .com domain names.
By doing a Google search for the exact match .com name, you will see all of those developed websites that use that term in their domain name. There is your first round list of end user prospects when you look to sell the domain name. You can also search for that exact term without the domain name, such as “defense lawyer” in my example, and then you can see what I did to sell one of my domain names to an end user company.
Obviously the term needs to be generic, so something like VolvoDealer.com wouldn’t pass that test, even though there are a number of dealerships that use the term “VolvoDealer.com” in their domain names.
Hi Elliot, nice post! Ironically, I own the exact match for your example (Defense Lawyers), but I own the dot org … do you think this would work for dot net and dot org?
Using the inurl:”keyword” command in Google helps me accomplish this quite nicely.
Nice post!
Hi Elliot,
I just wanted to let you know I tried your strategy to sell AttorneyNY.com. I contacted 50-100 law firms and only received 1 response which did not lead to a sale. I do not believe most lawyers understand the value of domain names.
@ Yury
I don’t think that’s a great name to be honest. NYAttorney.com would be better, and if response rates are generally low for very good names, it would be even more difficult for second/third tier names. It’s not the exact match keyword name people search for, IMO.
It may not be as good as NYattorney but comparatively its still a pretty good name. AttorneyChicago.com drew $4300 (reported at dnjournal). Also there are a lot of websites that have the exact match of KeywordAttorneyNY.com.
Shhh! Don’t tell anyone about this tool.
http://domain-search.domaintools.com/?q=defenselawyer.com
Thanks Rob! I really hope they keep this tool free. I was previously using ZFBot.com, but this looks much more intuitive.
Great post Elliot!
I also try to look for the Title Tags that the company uses on its website home page. Usually, these are a good indicator of what terms the company ‘highly values for SEO and Advertising initiatives.