Domaining for search traffic
jasonleow • 6 Dec 2022 •
I was inspired by what @searchbound buying up descriptive domains of emojis with high search volume, and I went and did the same for emojis related to my products.
Some context: Peter’s a domainer, and his mode of operation is buying descriptive domains and building useful websites on them, usually job boards, e.g. VidaliaOnions.com, RanchWork.com, SEOjobs.com, BirthdayParties.com
I bought writingemoji.com (2.1k monthly search vol) and writinghandemoji.com (300 monthly search vol) for Lifelog. And plugemoji.com (1.0k mthly search vol) for Plugins For Carrd.
The hope is that I can somehow use them to generate organic search traffic for their respective products. To be honest, I don’t know if it’ll work! The search volume isn’t super high unlike for heart emoji – 160k searches. But it sure sounds fun, and might be a good way to play around with tools and lead gens aka “side project marketing”.
Other ideas:
- Promote my other products/side projects
- Affiliate links, e.g. to a Carrd subscription or to my Carrd templates
- Show ads from Google (but unlikely)
- Show ads of other indie hackers
- Collect emails for my products
Fun experiment! Let’s see how this unfolds!
Comments
I see I see. The algo no longer favours it but humans still do, I think. I think Peter had a good blog post where he shared why his approach works to human psychology… e.g. if I’m looking for bike tours and I see BikeTours.com and GoSojourn.com, I’ll still click on the former, even if both are legit businesses. We trust descriptive dot coms more.
Yes, agreed. You could also look into snapping up some writing related expired domains that were previously used, have backlinks and possibly some traffic going to them still. Can be a good way to kickstart a new project or site.
Let you in on a secret, @tao - The one domain I’ve been wanting to snap up for Lifelog is 200wordsaday.com 😆 But it’s now in some aftermarket marketplace, costs $2000. 😠
I think the EMD (exact match domain) ship might have sailed now, but people still believe that Google and other search engines use the words in the domain name as a ranking factor. Be interesting to see how they do!