Lets imagine, for a moment, that you are a bricks and mortar retailer selling classic car spare parts in London, England and you want to set up a website. The chances of you finding even a remotely generic domain name at a reasonable price is negligible. So you decide to go with something like DavesCarSpareParts.com. Its not a great domain, but it is descriptive.
Once your site is up and running you look at how to market your website. The name you have chosen is the best you could find, and you may even be able to rank well when people type in ‘Daves Car Spare Parts’ into the Google search box, but few people type this in, anyway. What is worse its hard to say over the telephone and its not that easy to remember.
So if you cannot get a reasonably generic domain for your business, what can you do?
The problem is one that many, many businesses face and there is a trend developing that may have serious implications for domain names and domaining.
According to trend monitoring website The Trendwatch, the solution Japanese businesses in this situation are starting to adopt is interesting, to say the least. There is an emerging trend for Japanese businesses to optimize their sites for specific keywords and promoting the keywords people should use to search for their business in advertising, as well as the site URL:-
It turns out that search boxes seem to be the latest thing in advertising all over the little island, and have been for the past few months. Not only do they list the URL, but they also place a search box in the ad, with the keywords already placed.
So the business in our example just needs to pick some memorable keywords and encourage people to search on these words such as ‘car spares’, ‘a1 parts’ or even ‘Daves spares’.
I think that trends like this pose a significant threat to the value of generic domains. If its going to cost me $2,600,000 for a domain like Pizza.com but I can rank no 1 in Google for ‘love pizza’ at a fraction of that price annually, then I am going to at least consider the cheaper option. Furthermore, for many businesses this might be their only option. Keywords are back but this time its serious.
I think you are missing something here… Generic keywords domains dont need advertising… They naturally come to mind. So is it best to spend $100 000 advertising pete’s car parts to a few every year or get the generic at ten fold ?
Premium generic names are so valuable because they are natural advertising. Every thing come at a price down here…
Advertising is certainly not a threat to generic names… It’s in fact the core value of generic names.
I see this trend doing better in the long run. Humans are visual creatures and they tend to remember things like searching for keywords like “spare parts” instead typing-in spareparts.com. Plus a good incentive to do a search is familiarity with use of search engines with would give people several search engine results instead of one url giving them limited options. Search engines are great take-off points.
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