One of the neat things about owning domain names with websites that get a good amount of traffic is the ability to analyze traffic data, especially the traffic that comes from search engines. Google Analytics is a great tool to see what information people are searching for in Google and Yahoo, and where they visit on your site.
This data can also be a great way to find domain names that you may want to register to take advantage of the search engine traffic. Instead of looking at the GAKT data, you can see the “real data” from your own experience, and since the traffic landed on your site, there’s a good chance you already know the field/vertical.
Yesterday afternoon, I was looking through my search data, and around 68% of the daily traffic was from Google. I dug deeper, and I noticed that a lot of traffic was coming from variations searches for the name of a concert tour that was coming through Lowell. I quickly searched to see if anyone owned the domain name, and it was a huge domain company that picked it up a few months ago, likely after noticing the same trends.
Although the term may not exactly be generic, it’s likely it will earn far more than the cost of the name, and of course if this is done over a huge amount of domain names, the overall risk is mitigated and a business decision can be made.
However, you can also do this for non-trademarked search terms. For example, if I see that I am getting a lot of traffic for “Lowell fireworks,” it might be a good idea to buy the .com and either forward it to the fourth of July page or build a one page site with info about fireworks every year and back link to the main site. It would be cheap to host, easy to build, and as the exact match domain name, it would probably rank pretty high. This could be beneficial to your domain name.
Whether you opt to park, redirect, or use for backlinks, the domain names you find via analytics data could be very valuable to your company.
Along this same line of thinking, one can also look at the Google Adwords campaigns you run to promote certain sites. I found a phrase for one campaign that generated a considerable number of impressions under Adwords but using the keyword tool the search results don’t appear. The .Net domain was available so I registered it, built a quick site on the name and published. The phrase is not a competitive one so it is starting to rank at Google. I’m hoping the disparity between GAKT and Adwords campaigns proves to be an exploitable opportunity. If not, my acquisition cost was reg fee and the site didn’t take long to put together.
@ Leonard
Will be interesting to see.
Elliot, do you mostly use Google Analytics or parsing your own logs?
@ Jason
GA and Stat Counter
@Elliot
Cool article. asked you about backlinks a few months ago. Can you elaborate on the second to the last paragraph?
Would you point the searched key word specific domain name to your 4th of July page? How would you back link that domain back to the main website? Thanks.
Maybe create a one page lander with the back link “Lowell Fireworks” pointing to the page on Lowell.com with info on fireworks.