Developing Geodomains

Many domainers and online entrepreneurs are attracted to the money making potential of developing geodomains – domain names relating to a geographical location such as a town or city. On the face of things this looks like a potential money spinner with city sites offering multiple revenues sources from things like accommodation booking, car hire and event ticket sales.

The development of geodomains is also reasonably straightforward, with many development aids available. The process is not that different to development of domains in general. However, there are some things to think about before embarking on the development of city, town or location based website. I have been working on a city site of my own - ManchesterWide.com - so I thought I would share some of my thoughts, based on my experience of developing ManchesterWide.com

All the pure geodomains are gone?

Yes - no surprises here - unless you have substantial money to invest. For those readers who are not domainers, domain names relating to specific locations are particularly sought after and regularly change hands for relatively large sums of money. Of those, .com domains are the most sought after. Dot coms are particularly sought after as they receive what is called “type-in” traffic. This comes from people typing the place name into their browsers address bar, followed by “.com”.

To make matters worse, it is important to realise the advantage pure .com place names have compared with domains that simply include the place name. London.com will receive high numbers of type in traffic but EveryoneLovesLondon.com, or LetsGoToLondon.com, for example, will receive comparatively little of this free traffic. If you choose to develop a .net or a .org domain , say London.net, you will bleed traffic and customers to the .com of that domain because people frequently type in the dot com version of the domain, in error.

Most of the larger city .com domain names in the US are in the hands of a few big players and are developed into travel sites and city guide sites. The interesting thing is that the success of geo .com city sites has revealed / confirmed that there is demand for such sites and proves that there is a market out there for city related information.

Is it worth it? Given the massive advantage of having a city dot com should you abandon any ideas of competing against the big players altogether?

There are opportunities for domainers who realise that they cannot simply copy pure geo domin websites. They also need to realise that without the type-in traffic that pure .com geos have, they will need to work much, much harder to generate traffic.

Have you missed the boat? If you are starting now, you are probably up against established sites and if you are thinking of developing a site related to a town or city of any significant size you are probably going to find some sort of competition. You have missed the boat if you want a .com version of the domain, unless you have between $xx,xxx and $xxx,xxx or more to buy a .com domain. You will also need the resources to develop it effectively. In all other respects the game is still wide open.

What about the competition? Type in the name of any reasonably large city into Google.com and the results you will get demonstrate that there are some big hitters in the top 7 - 10 results.

On the first page of Google search results you can expect to find the .com of the city, the city government site, the local University website, the government funded tourist information website, the website of the local newspaper and probably the websites of a lot of other big budget organisations.

For example, when typing in the word “SanFrancisco” into Google.com the first page of web results included:-

• Official tourists website
• The Wikipedia article relating to that city
• The .com website
• The city/ county Government ’s official website
• Two media sites (a radio station and a newspaper) for the area
• The local airport website
• The University website

I can only say that the competition is tough. However, there are lots of different ways to generate traffic, including optimizing your site for a number of keywords, using sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Twitter and MySpace to get the word out. Regularly updated compelling, keyword rich content, will help, as will word of mouth and paid for online and offline media advertising.

I am still unsure what strategy will be best for ManchesterWide.com and I will update my progress here as I develop the site further.