Hotels for kids .com
jasonleow • 8 Jul 2024 •
Yesterday I randomly replied to a tweet from @marckohlbrugge’s tweet about hotels-with-gyms.com about needing a hotels-for-kids.com.
Then saw people reply to my reply, excited about it.
Then I quote tweeted it saying that someone should build it.
Separately I checked the domain out of interest - hotelsforkids.com is already taken (since 2006!), but hotels-for-kids.com was available! I was pretty sure I don’t want to build it, though it sure was tempting to just buy it first.
Then a friend replied with an Ahrefs analysis that the niche has potential:
And a few hours after this tweet, someone bought the domain hotels-for-kids.com
The moral of the story? Classic case of building in public currently:
- Nice side of building in public is everyone pitching in to give some early sensing of the opportunity. You get a seed of the potential of the idea from how people respond to it.
- Downside of building in public: Someone’s always watching, and ready to clone your product. We know word-for-word copycats are rife now. If you have a great opportunity and domain, buy it first before talking about it.
- Middle point of view: Even without that sweet domain, someone can still build the idea. Using hotelsfor-kids.com or kid-friendly-hotels.com for example. It’s about the execution. How are you going to get backlinks, what content will you write, how to optimize for SEO etc. Just the domain alone isn’t a silver bullet. Ideas are plenty, execution is the differentiator.
So, anyone going to build a directory for that?
Comments
Not sure about the SEO side of it working. Exact match domains are long dead too. However, it would be a great basis for a confident child and parent to start a YouTube channel visiting cool hotels around the world and having the website as the back-end for affiliate content.
Isn’t the term for such a hotel “family-friendly?”
@drodol Yes starting to do it more. Used to build more from gut feel, or for myself, or if I have some prior experience in the niche. But some basic keyword research is great especially for folks who’s not great at marketing/self-promoting. I mostly follow this approach by Danny Postmaa.
@tao Really, exact match domains are dead?? I had good experience with it with my products. And see it for many others too. Maybe the psychological aspect of seeing one still works?
@therealbrandonwilson yeah that’s another keyword. So many possible combos for domain name! No excuses
Well, not saying they don’t work at all any more, as you say, they might be good for visual/brand recognition etc - but the use of them for SEO reward (especially with thinner spammy sites) was specifically targetted by a Google update years ago: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/emd-update/
@tao Oh nice, thanks for the article. Very educational. Yeah, if good qual content with EMD, would still work i guess.
I have been curious about this approach of not building until you have first done keyword research (or SEO research) of the niche. It seems logical to look into it before you start coding, because if there is no interest, then you’d waste time building something no one wants.
Are you doing this (or have done this) for your projects?