Common knowledge for success amongst leaders in the online community can be resolved with three simple letters- s e o
Search Engine Optimisation………
No matter where you look, what you read or who you choose to listen to, those three letters are the cornerstone to any successful online business. SEO has been a rather cliche` term in the industry for several years now and it’s a <keyword> in itself when web development companies are pitching their best presentation to get a gig. However, over the last 4 months we have been on a mission to prove 2 things via case studies and I’m happy to share one of them with you now.
The most important factor in SEO is the domain name. It’s NOT content. It’s NOT keyword optimisation for maximum density. It’s NOT backlinks. It’s NOT pagerank. It’s NOT pingbacks. It’s NOT trackbacks. It’s NOT directory submissions. Although I will completely agree that each and every factor that I’ve said is NOT the most important IS in fact important in their own right.
Let’s talk bare basics here: You’re a consumer. You have bad credit. You need a loan to consolidate your debt. What are you going to type into your search bar to receive a result that you can efficiently spend time in seeking what you are desiring, which ultimately, is a loan. Type it here with me: [ bad credit consolidation loan ]
Search it. That’s what I would type in and I’m not alone. The average searches per month on Google is 22,000 searches for bad credit consolidation loans. Now I ask you with all due respect- if you have the most awesome company in the World that is currently in business writing 100 loans per day and growing at a rate of 12%, but you’re spending 20% on SEO and online marketing campagins, why not just own the domain badcreditconsolidationloan.com.au?
If you are a company that is an expert in the financial field and your business should be booming with consulting as this global financial crisis worsens, shouldn’t you be branding your existing business from a domain like financeconsulting.com.au or financestrategies.com.au. As we’ve demonstrated in our corporate dvd, smartbanking.com.au is owned by National Australia Bank.
Even though this was a brilliant move by the NAB to acquire such a great, brandable domain name, they’re failing miserably at actually making it work for them. They should be at the very minimum redirecting their smartbanking.com.au domain to their existing website homepage or a special page within their existing website to display a MESSAGE- ANY MESSAGE- SOMETHING! ANYTHING!
To sum up this article on a Sunday afternoon, it’s best to look for <keyword> domains in this industry of tough competitors with a failing finance sector and a grip on credit like we’ve never experienced. What if you had to get credit now? Would you want to look up [get credit next week] or [get credit tomorrow] or [get credit now]? We like getcreditnow.com.au.
Forming the strategy of spending only 20% on marketing and actually growing by 20% is brilliant in itself, but what if you spent the 20% on expanding your assets with domains that are <keywords> of your industry to maximise your expense and expand growth via your own virtual property??
James Wester
Tags: Branding, Keyword Domains, NAB domain name, smartbanking.com.au