Exact Match Domaining For Free B2B Traffic

November 26, 2009

The art and science of getting your website highly ranked in the major search engines has become more important in the marketing mix for companies struggling to get leads through the usual B2B channels of trade shows, cold calling, etc.

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process typically involves

1. massive amounts of new content on the website in the form of articles
2. adjusting the structure of the websites to follow best practices to make digesting information easier to website visitors,
3. Building quality links to the webpages so they are seen as “authoritative sources on X topic” by the search engines.

This is just a very basic outline of the process, but is time-tested and can provide a tremendous ROI for B2B companies. The B2B landscape in many search engine markets is still quite uncompetitive.

However, there is another “little known” process B2B companies can use to get more visitors via the Search Engines, that most companies are not using.

Exact Match Domains

Popular SEO author Aaron Wall owns a 1-page site called SearchEngineHistory.com and it ranks #1 in Google for that keyword ahead of a much larger websites even though it has very few incoming links from websites. There are thousands of other examples like this on the web.

How do these tiny websites outrank powerhouse Fortune-500 companies?

1. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN rely on people finding what they need. If I type in the name of a company in Google and that company does not show up, then I think “Google is broken – time to use Yahoo” or something to that effect.It is very hard for Google or any search engine to distinguish between what is a company name and what is a phrase. Search Engine History could be somebody looking for the history of search engines, or this could be the brand name of a company.
2. Most people if they’re linking to a website from theirs, will use the name of the site in the text of the link. (e.g. search avalancheinternetmarketing.com for the newest info on…) Google looks at the words people use to link to information and uses that in determining how highly you are ranked in their search engine results.

Advantage B2B Companies Have Over B2C In the Domain Game

There are professional “domainers” with automated processes to comb the Internet for potentially valuable domains, and buy them up. Some of these domainers have domain portfolios valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Until they can sell the domains, they  send people to a page full of ads served up by Google or Yahoo and get a few cents for each person that clicks.

Many B2B terms either

• don’t have enough traffic to be worth it to professional domainers, and many of these types of automated ad pages domainers use don’t put up relevant ads.
• are obscure enough where their jargon is not discovered by some of these domainers.

Conversely, B2B companies are often selling 5 or 6 figure products or services with a very narrow silo of potential customers. If a person is looking for an “enterprise web content management system”, you can tell right away the person is a reasonably qualified individual.

A very specific B2B term with a couple hundred searches per month could yield several highly qualified prospects and serious revenue for very little investment. The cost of a domain is currently less than $10/year so the level of risk is small, and the potential benefits are high.

How Can You Start Benefiting From Exact Match Domains

1. What are ways people would look for your product or service? What synonymous terms are there? What are problems people have where your product or service is a natural answer?
2. Do some keyword research to determine how many people roughly search for those terms on a monthly basis, and sort largest to smallest
3. Determine what your average value per lead is. It’s easy to seek perfect information and never complete this part, but it is the cornerstone piece of data for any marketing a company will do.
4. See what domains from that list are available
5. Construct a simple, yet authoritative website to capture leads
6. Do some basic SEO link building
7. Rake in leads for your sales team and count your money

C’mon, Is it That Easy?

It can be, if…

1. If you know how to set websites up to generate the maximum number of leads per 100 visitors. Many of these B2B phrases don’t have a ton of traffic, so you’ll need to be razor-sharp in terms of how well your website makes a strong enough case they should take the next step in a relationship with you.
2. Provide valuable information
3. Can conduct extensive keyword research to locate the most profitable phrases for your business
4. Can conduct fast domain research to locate which domains are available, and to avoid common mistakes businesses make when purchasing domains.
5. Can turn out a professional website very fast, with a turn-key system – corporate websites can sometimes take forever to get through the various stages of approvals, wait for content to be written, etc. For example, we have a turnkey system whereby we can launch the basic structure of a professional-looking website in 5-10 minutes. The copywriter and domain registration take a couple extra days, but you have a site up and running in under a week from start to finish with a minimal amount of effort. One recommendation is to divorce the website somewhat from your company – that minimizes some of the branding concerns and can even improve your ability to generate leads since it will appear more independent and informational in nature.
6. Be able to track your results to determine if the exact match domain experiment should be continued or delayed.
7. Know what type of link building you’ll need to have this website integrated well enough into the “fabric of the web” for the search engines to take it seriously.
8. Have the patience to wait several months for results to kick in.
9. But most of all – conduct all these steps at a positive return on investment, and use your internal resources wisely.

Most B2B companies are stretched pretty thin handling current customers and sales and may not have the expertise on-hand to conduct such a project with a high enough return on investment to outweigh the opportunity costs of other marketing channels.

However, exact match domains are here to stay until search engines can learn to read our minds or drastically change how search engines operate. These websites also become assets for the company vs. one-time ads that disappear and the end of the billing cycle. Even if a company isn’t able to capitalize on the financial benefits of a domain name, they can use domain brokers to sell it to people who can & will.

Avalanche Internet Marketing are experienced in domain acquisition and valuation, plus all of the other steps necessary to launch projects like these with a strong return on investment to you, in less time. Contact us today to discuss your options for domaining projects, or more traditional SEO services.