We have a lot of clients that collect domain names. In addition to their primary site domain name, they may have a few extra names they decided to register just in case. Some people collect dozens of names thinking that they may want to use them in the future for some purpose. While the idea of buying as many domains as you can related to your service offering makes sense on the surface, most people don’t keep in mind what it takes to make one of these domains successful.
Why Collect Domain Names?
- For future use with additional sites – You may start out with xyzwidgets.com but later on decide to start a specialty site with just ywidgets.com to focus on a single product or service.
- To use in advertising – If you have a long domain or have something special you are advertising, you might use a specific domain to redirect to a certain page on your site. For instance, bestywidget.com might redirect to xyzwidgets.com/ywidgets.html. This is also helpful for tracking the success of a campaign because if you only use that domain in a specific ad, you can judge how successful the ad spend was by how much traffic came to that domain.
- Competition – Some people will register domains just to keep others from registering and become competitors. Xyzwidgets.com might register xyzwidget.com so no one else takes it.
- Sales – Some people will buy domain names only to turn around and sell to others. While this was a big practice in the early days of the web, most domains aren’t worth the asking price the owners think they’re worth. Anyone can make a domain name successful so the “special” domain you registered probably isn’t worth what you think it is.
Something to keep in mind about collecting domain names with the idea of building future sites: just like it takes ongoing marketing for your primary site to be successful, the same must be done for each new site. Each site you build needs its own unique content and a marketing plan behind it to be successful and achieve rankings. If you use duplicate content from your primary site you will risk having both sites penalized by search engines.
If you do plan to do it the right way and build a new site with unique content and market it along with your primary site, you can estimate almost doubling your marketing expenses as now you have two sites you are trying to make successful. Over time, this can pay off but you have to do the math. We have seen clients who create “focus sites” to complement their primary site increase total lead capture by 10-15% for that service offering once it is ranking well on the search engines.
No matter what your strategy behind collecting domain names may be, your primary focus should always be making your main site successful first and then think about a secondary site. Start slow and have the same realistic expectations as you did when your primary site went live. Nothing happens overnight and it takes proving to Google that you deserve to be ranked.