Domain Names and SEO help

benjaminM

I have been approached by various businesses offering me search engine optimization. One of the things they do is buy a domain names for you such as, carinsurancecardiff.com and then optimize the page so it appears higher in google.

I have already bought a couple and I can tell from my analytics they are bringing in some hits.

The guy who is doing this told me that what they do is look on keywords website for phrases with high searches and they buy that domain. The one I bought (see above) has a monthly search of around 91 and when I type that phrase into google up I pop on the first page. Is that just luck or does this stuff work?

I have just been playing around on key words looking for phrases people might search for and I have just found something relevant to my business that yealds 33,000 searches a month. Should I be excited by that? Have I just stumbled across a potential gold mine?

Another question... I pay this firm around £250 for say 4 or 5 domains and optimisation. I know I can buy the domains for £6.00 each off the internet. All this firm does is duplicate my own website home page and adds some keywords (or is it more complicated than that?) Could I do it myself and save myself a few quid bearing in mind I'm not an IT expert.

Thanks in advance.

googler

There's lots of instructional pages out there regarding SEO. As you've realised, it's not economic sense to pay someone else to acquire a domain name for you when you can purchase it yourself much cheaper.

It's easy to get to the top of google for a search term that's rare or comparatively little used. I could easily optimise a page for the search term "fish farming patagonia" but it's of little use or relevance to a UK business.

Is the search term TRULY relevant to you, both geographically and business-wise? Is there any possibility that the 33,000 searches that are being carried out are being done by citizens in the USA who have a similar geographic name in their locale.....? i.e. searching for 'Birmingham plumber' could be relevant to Birmingham, UK and Birmingham, Alabama......

zee_2

buy your domains from 123reg.co.uk fair prices , good service [ online site help better than phone] NO charge for moving [ some charge £25]
..there are free search engines , to be noticed you need content ,another way is joining forums, domains are noticed by google ect.
I have over 800+ domains and never paid for search engines.
look up acorndomains.co.uk ,free to join . any questions you ask will have genuine answers.......zee

sarahmurphymoo

don't bother paying for SEO stuff, it's all out there on the web for you to read, i think it comes down to a few things.

Really good written content - Google is forever trying to update its spiders to behave more and more like a human, - so write for a human, not for a robot.

Refresh content - continually update it and refresh it to keep google coming back

Links - every link counts, don't got spamming databases with them though. You need the links to be as natural as possible

Other smaller things come into play such as speed of the page loading, clean html code etc etc - but that isn't really a big part of it all.

Social media (ie facebook) is helpful too, if people are sharing your links and liking your site, you get hits naturally, but also the search engines pick up that you are a "talked about" site and potentially improve your rankings too.

Finally - it takes time... months - so don't expect a couple of tweaks overnight to get you to number 1.

gazfocus

The company you pay to do your 'seo' doesn't even have to duplicate your website content. It's called domain parking and basically all of your new domains point to the one website (it's about a 10 second job). The trick is once the keywords are in place, you need to start building good quality links. These will get you further up in the search esults. Just be careful that Google don't see your new domains as duplicate sites as they frown upon that.

benjaminM

Thanks for all the advice.

I dont know the first thing about duplicating a page, keywords or heavens forbid building a website! Where do I start? I bought the domains from heart internet and they were very cheap. All I would need is one simple web page for each domain with hyperlinks back to the main site.

With absolutley no experience in this at all, is it possible for me to do it, or should I just give this firm £300 to do it? They have agreed to build me a mini a site (2 pages) and then duplicate a further 5 pages with my other domains. I think for the money I'm getting a reasonable deal and they know what they are doing, unlike me!

The business I am in is insurance and through research we have found that people are not searching in local terms. For instance not that many people are searching for 'house insurance London' which suprised me. People tend to search for 'cheap house insurance' or 'house insurance quote' and miss out the locality. Its getting increasingly challeging to find ways of directing new traffic to our website which is why I'm looking at more generic national key word or domains. Its also difficult being a very small fish in huge pond where our competitors have seemingly endless budgets!

Complicated stuff this seo!

Tshirty

You'll want to avoid duplicating the same content across all of your sites as Google will only rank the website with the most authority (the oldest, with the best quality links) over the others if everything else is equal (like all the content being the same). At least write some unique content for each of the sites pages, as long as each page is around 35% unique with the important elements being changed on each page - <title> tags and <h1> tags then you'll be able to get each page on each site to rank for your chosen keywords.

The 80/20 rule applies when trying to get a site to rank. 20% of the job is getting your site in order (on-page optimsation and content) and 80% of the ranking comes from getting quality links pointing to your sites pages, preferably from other related pages on the web.

I assume your using the google Keyword tool at adwords.google.co.uk to come up with 33,000 number. If so then make sure that once you have entered the key phrase that you select "exact match" on the left toolbar as this option provides the actual number of people typing exactly that phrase in to Google as "your keyword phrase". This is very important because the default is set to "broad match" which means it will display how many people are typing your keyword phrase with any variation of your keyphrase like "something before your keyword phrase and after it" which gives over inflated numbers for what you're trying to achieve by buying a key phrase specific domain.

Example:

A search for Broad Match for "car insurance cardiff" reports 91 searches per month for the phrase under broad match.

This means people could be searching for "cheap car insurance cardiff uk" and this kind of search is included becuase you've selected "broad match".

A more accurate number for the phrase "car insurance cardiff" is done via an Exact match search which reports 58 searches per month for this exact phrase and is more relevant to you because the domain you're buying is carinsurancecardiff.co.uk or .com and not cheapcarinsurancecardiff.co.uk /.com

You could still rank your carinsurancecardiff.co.uk or .com for the phrase "cheap car insurance cardiff" but it's involves optimmising the homepage for more than one keyword or optimising another page on your website for that phrase, for example a page on your website in the format: carinsurancecardiff.co.uk/cheap/

I hope this has helped you understand the tool your using a little more.

gazfocus

have sent you a pm about this.