While I think it’s always smart to register domain names in an industry in which you are familiar, there are plenty of times where this isn’t feasible or sensible. When you aren’t entirely familiar with a particular industry, looking at some of the page titles in industry specific websites can give you good ideas about what types of names would have value.
If a company dedicates a page on its website to a specific topic or service, or if it mentions the term in the title of it’s home page, I would bet that it’s likely that the .com domain name of that exact match term will be of interest to them or someone else in their industry.
Let’s use the search term “soccer cleats” to illustrate my point. Here’s a look at some of the page title keyword phrases I found in Google when I search for soccer cleats:
- Soccer Cleats
- Soccer Jerseys
- Soccer Gear
- Soccer Equipment
- Soccer Balls
- Indoor Soccer Shoes
- Soccer Goals
- Youth Soccer
- Soccer Footwear
In my opinion, if you owned the .com of any of these key phrases, it would be likely one or more of the leading soccer sales companies (either those listed in the top of the results or those advertising) would be interested in buying the domain name from you. Some of the .com names would be more valuable than others, but if you found one for sale for a few thousand dollars, you could probably flip it for more.
Searching like this has been done by people like myself for a while, and many of the strong keyword names have been registered for a number of years. However, there are plenty of terms that can still be bought and flipped for great prices. Doing research like this is important because there are plenty of companies who would LOVE to own names like these, but they wouldn’t know how to get them.
If you do the legwork, which includes domain research, acquisition negotiations, and buyer research, you could end up making some great deals.
Great idea – I have to give it a try.
Indeed, everything of genius is simple 🙂 Hand-registered a couple of very nice names using this approach. Thanks for the hint!
I never honestly thought of doing it this way. It’s simple yet genius! The way I started doing it was running a site:”competitor” query in Google and taking page titles from other competitors.
This of course along with running a normal search query like “wordpress themes”. This has helped me tremendously in my domain purchasing. Thanks for the tip.
Google Suggest is great for this too, as well as for keywords. Go to the Google box, start typing a query in, and if you have Suggest turned on, you’ll get ten or so popular queries that Google *thinks* might be what you want. They don’t always get all ten right, but there are usually some good ones. I mostly use it for long tail keyword ideas, but it could possibly work for domains too.