Is it worth buying a GREAT domain with rank?
-
Hey Guys,
I am in communication with the owner of a domain with very good domain rank - that ranks well for keywords important to me. Strangely enough the website it terrible?! (I though Google valued "content" these days?!). Anyhow, it's link profile is tidy including sites such as DMOZ.
His asking price for the domain is SUBSTANTIAL, however where it ranks for some keywords would be valuable for our organisation if we could leverage its authority.
My questions are:
1) Is it worth buys a GREAT domain with a crappy website that ranks for keywords that are important to us?
2) (if the answer to 1 is YES) How should one go about leveraging the rank to benefit our site/business?
3) What would be the best way to utilise the site - redirects? Build out some kind of content and link to main site?
Anyhow, hopefully some of you have great experience in this domain in the current Google Panda/Penguin white hat world?
Would REALLY appreciate your thoughts!!
-
OK... you say that you have....
-- GREAT domain
-- Great rankings
-- Valuable keywords
-- Tidy link profile
-- horrible website
That gets my blood pumping... I would be sniffing this site to see if I can do these...
-- improve the SEO and triple the traffic
-- redesign the site and make it twice as easy to use and double the conversion rate
-- create new content to make it more credible and go after new keyword that will double the traffic
-- reformat the product pages and double the income
-- so, after you triple the traffic from SEO, double conversion rate, double the traffic with new keywords and double again with better product pages.... this site will be making a fantastic amount of money
This, to me sounds like a candidate for a flip. A 301 redirect might be selling a champion racehorse for horse meat.
If this site was under my nose I might be grabbing it and taking away the sales from everyone else in that niche.
(No guarantees on the above... depends upon the attributes of the site you are starting with, your skill set and how hard you are willing to work)
-
Hey Brent
To me, this doesn't look like a wise investment. Regardless of its link profile, I'd be much more inclined to try and rank your current website rather than buying this domain and 301 redirecting it.
In any case, we can try and look at it from a financial standpoint and see if it is worthwhile.
To estimate the worth of ranking for those keywords, let's do some very rough estimations:
Take the local exact match search volume - example, 6,100.
Take the average click through rate for rank 1 - example 40%
Take the average conversion rate - example 3% (your mileage may vary greatly)
Take the average value of a conversion for that keyword - example £20.
So, 6,100 x 40% = 2440. 2440 x 3% = 73.2. 73.2 x £20 = £1464 - this is your average value for that keyword.
How much more than that amount is the asking price? What would be a comfortable investment for you? 3 months worth, 6 months? You may be able to find a comfortable price you'd want to buy at.
If you did buy the domain, 301ing the old domain to your site will pass on all of the value of their link profile, which in turn might help you rank in its place. The important thing to remember, however, is that this is all theory. The 301 redirect may not work that way and the site in question might not rank for that keyword for much longer, in which case the purchase would be pointless.
It's for those reasons why I would concentrate on trying to rank your current website. If you're thinking about investing, turn it around and think what you could do with that budget instead, or even half of it. You could create rich content, infographics, tools or plugins to try and rank higher in organic search, you could invest it in PPC adwords, you could look at display advertising and retargeting networks and so on.
You may find you'd make your money go further investing the money elsewhere.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Botched domain migration
tldr: we consolidated several of our domains from longdomain.com to domain.com over a year ago and lost our highest value keywords, roughly 70% of our traffic. All our links were natural google loved our site up until that point. Things started to go sideways then... Oct 2016: 301 redirect everything from http(s)://(www).longdomain.com/* to https://www.domain.com/*, traffic starts to slump Jan 2017: Traffic has slumped 30-40% from normal seasonal levels Apr 2017: We experiment with Rankscience, implementation is botched creating a robots.txt disallow: / which is corrected in a week. traffic slumps even more during this period, but this issue seems to recover over the next month or two (hard to tell since now we have multiple factors and seasonal traffic). Oct 2017: Start an engagement with a seo firm that has experience with migration issues. They find some pages which are not redirecting and claimed that google is confused by that and pages we were redirecting wouldnt pass all the pr value until every page on our old site (including non public ones that google seems to have scraped from emails) was redirected over. Interm: Site audits from the seo form, many minor onsite improvements, link disvow, etc etc, no impact really. Current day: Stumped, and the business is hurting from the lost rankings and cost of seo. Those high value rankings are just gone and I did everything by the book as best I know. Redirects, same content, just punished. Up until the interacting with Rankscience and the seo firm, I handled all the serp related concerns myself. This has left me pretty disillusioned and at my wits end on where to look next.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sonar0 -
Keyword keeps fluctuating between a high rank and no rank?
I've searched around and I can't seem to find anyone else describing the issue I'm seeing. Basically for a very long time our website (snappages.com) has always ranked in the tens and twenties for "create a website". It's a high volume keyword and we get a lot of traffic from it. Around May 16th it suddenly disappeared completely from search results on Google and now it will sporadically show back up with a SERP in the twenties every 5-10 days for a few hours and then completely disappear again. This pattern has continued to this day. I've checked and there are no manual penalties and nothing has really changed dramatically from a content perspective or anything like that. I would understand if we got penalized and our ranking dropped, or even if it just completely disappeared? This is the only keyword that this is happening for, all the others remain unaffected. Anyone know how I can find out why this is happening or have suggestions on how to fix it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stestone0 -
Web Site Ranking
Hi Folks, I made some changes on my website www.gemslearninginstitute.com and published it two days ago. It was ranking on Google first page for a few keywords. I did not touch the pages which were ranking on first page. Since then I am not seeing the website ranking on the Google. Does it take a few days to rank again? How can I ensure that next time if I update the website or publish some blog on my website then it should not effect the ranking. Secondly, if I would like to rank in three different cities then do I need to create separate pages for each city or how should I proceed with this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fslpso0 -
Why is my site not ranked?
Hey, does enybody have an idea, why my site www.detox.si is not ranked for the KW detox in www.google.si (Slovenia). It is being indexed, but it does not rank and i have no idea why. Best, M.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Spletnafuzija0 -
Primary Domain or Redirect?
We are starting a new travel guide for a resort town. I have bought an expired domain with decent related links and PR (which seems to have survived the transfer (4 months ago). Beofre we launch the new site I am trying to decide if we should use this expired domain as the primary URL for the new site or just do a permanent redirect and buy a new domain that better matches the theme of the site. I am obviously concerned with starting from scatch with a new domain. I am confident we can build some good rellevant links in a short time but this space is very competetive. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Locals0 -
Why won't my sub-domain blog rank for my brand name in Google?
For six months or so, my team and I have been trying to get our blog to rank on page one in Google for the term "Instabill." The URL, http://blog.instabill.com, is a sub-domain of our company website and they both use the same IP address. Three pages on our www.Instabill.com site rank in the top three spots when searching our brand name in Google. However, our blog ranks 100+. For our blog, we are currently using b2evolution and nginx. We have tried adding static content on the home page, static content in the sidebar, static content on an About Instabill page, and optimizing blog posts for the keyword Instabill, but nothing seems to work. We appreciate any advice you can provide to us. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Instabill
Meghan0 -
My Domain rank is falling but my traffic is improving?
I have been here for one month today and have been reworking many pages to improve my On-Page results for my site www.antiquebanknotes.com I have seen some really nice improvement in my organic, search and non paid keywords. (up 38%, 21% and 29% this week) But last week all of a sudden my domain authority dropped from 10 to 9. Not tragic but still odd since I have been getting some decent results from my optimazations. My competitors have domain authority in the 20's so it's something I am sure I need to work on. I have added links out to relevant sites and added lots of content but my domain authority falls? Is this common when a site makes lots of changes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Is this Domain Change Worthwhile?
Hi- I have a client who has setup a new criminal law firm in the last few months. The URL is like: www.somenamelawyers.com ['somename' is the same # characters as their company name] I have run a successful AdWords a/c for them and many of the big traffic and conversion keywords include 'criminal lawyers'. From a SEO perspective, the long goal is to get traffic for 'criminal lawyers' and keywords that phrase match that. So I am considering migrating them to www.somenamecriminallawyers.com. I have researched this issue and understand the technicalities involved in moving. My question here is 'is this change worthwhile'. I think it is worthwhile because it really is in a sense rebranding them to be more clearly in a specific business domain, ie. criminal law. Also, they are a new outfit so they don't have a lot of backlinks yet. And mainly, they will get a SEO boost to their core keywords 'criminal lawyers'. Thanks in advance for your thoughts- Jules
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Juller0