I’ve always been under the assumption that many prospective domain name buyers type the domain name into their browser to see what exists on the domain name. Having a “for sale” landing page or inquiry page can help facilitate a sale when a prospective buyer visits the domain name to see what exists on it. According to a Squadhelp, my assumption may not be the full picture.
Squadhelp CEO Darpan Munjal shared that a recent study from his company showed a prospective buyer is 4x as likely to search Google for a domain name than type it into their browser:
Based upon our recent study, when a buyer is interested in a name, they are 4X more likely to Google it, rather than type the URL in a browser to see what comes up.
An SEO optimized lander which ranks in Google search results should be an important priority to maximize exposure
— Darpan (@darpanmunjal) September 25, 2021
This could have a pretty big implication for domain investors. Ensuring that a domain name appears high in Google search results when that domain name is searched could help direct a prospective buyer to the landing page. Search engine optimization of my domain name inventory is not something I really considered because I didn’t think Google had any interest in indexing domain name landing pages.
Domain registrants who want to try to get their domain names indexed (highly) in Google results should do their due diligence when choosing how to utilize their domain name. If the domain name is parked, I would search Google for the domain name – or other domain names using the parking service – to see if Google ranks them. If I wanted to use a “for sale” landing page, I would do the same thing with names that utilize the same lander. This could show what is possible for that particular design or platform.
A domain name registrant may have little control over search optimization when using a third party service. Some platforms and services allow users to fully customize their landing pages with a focus on SEO optimization. Some services do not allow any customizations at all.
Getting solid search rankings isn’t something that is easy to achieve even if the landing pages are customized. A super generic domain name that is for sale would likely have serious SERP competition from developed websites that use similar domain names.
I have not read the Squadhelp study and do not know the context beyond what was tweeted. If the study results is applicable to all types of domain names, the SEO aspect of domain name utilization is something to think about.
We’ve been hosting, building up relatively unique landing pages for all our domains at ODYS Global for several years. We’ve also noticed the % of organic traffic a domain gets while hosted, live and healthy indexed in Google will surpass, in time, the type-in or referral traffic the domain gets. So definitely NOT ignoring this one.
We’ve been calling this strategy ‘warmed up domains’
Also, on the Google/SEO side of things: when a hosted, live and indexed domain doesn’t rank for it’s own name, then there’s a very big chance the domain has been abused, therefore penalized in the past, so it’s a potential red flag, considering additional resources may be required in order for it to perform when you start deploying your site and content later on, regardless how premium the ‘name’ is.
I believe this as on one of my sites, we have business profiles and these appear higher in organic search then the same profile on the company’s/client’s website. this is partly due to domain authority, clean code in the backend, SEO and so many other reasons. once a profile is created by the client, it takes about 24 to 48 hours to take effect. couldn’t believe it at first but it’s true. sometimes you don’t even see the company website but our landing page yes and on page 1 of google search.
In the good old days when IE ruled the roost, a keyword typed into the URL bar that didn’t resolve had .com automatically appended to it. That, right there, is the reason .com is still King today.
Then Firefox became the biggest browser, and they were being paid by Google to send all unresolvable URL entries to the search engine. Type-in traffic plummeted and never returned to those historic levels.
Concommitantly, Google was strong-arming web/domain developers to put the google-analytics web bug on every page and TELLING webmasters what their content should look like to gain rank. Webmasters, keen to rank high, sold their souls to Google.
The rest, unfortunately, is history.