The Power of Micro Niche Sites with Exact Match Domain Names

Posted in Case Studies on Apr 9th, 2010 | 14 comments

This is a topic that I’m actually planning on exploring in some case studies very very soon, but there was a post on Hacker News a few days ago that served as a great example of this topic so I figured why the hell not, let’s start there.

What I’m going to go over here is how truly effective an exact match keyword domain name can be when used on simple micro niche sites. I guess I’ll first go into what both of those concepts mean, then I’ll jump into the subject of this analysis.

What is an Exact Match Domain Name?

This is simply a domain name that has the EXACT keyword that you want to target in it. That’s it. No extras “the” or “at” or extra words at the beginning or end of it. Simply the exact keyword someone would type in at Google to come to your site, without the spaces. Technically, hyphens don’t count either, but sometimes domains with them can work out well.

So if you wanted to rank for “sunflower seeds”, having the domain www.sunflowerseeds.com, .org, or .net would be the exact match domain name. Something like www.sunflowerseedsstore.com wouldn’t cut it.

You might have seen people talk about the advantages of an exact match domain name around different forums and blog posts before, so this might not come as a surprise, but having your exact keywords in your domain name can give you a HUGE boost in the SERPS. Google eats up sites like this, and in low to moderate competition niches, you can pretty easily rank on the front page with minimal backlinking. Additionally, if you see an exact match domain name in the top ten, you better be prepared to really beat them in terms of linkbuilding and on page SEO, because they will have an inherent advantage over you because of the keywords in their domain. (more…)