For years one of my customers has stuck with the idea that his domain name should be his business name and that was the end of it. Well as SEO’s we know that having a keyword rich domain name is much better unless your an established brand, and even then we can easily do multiple websites.
This local client has been getting 90% new customers through the local listings I manage, and even canceled his yellow pages listing in 2011. The bad part of that is that he is only ranking #1 for the lesser searched phrase.
I decided I would just go ahead and get the keyword rich location based domain (ex: autorepairscottsdale.com), since no one else has it (score!) and then just redirect the Analytic’s traffic to that domain. It beats doing a handful of 301 redirecting from the old site to the new one if it didn’t do anything, and this way I can see 100% for certain how much it affects the ranking.
Results
The graphic below shows the Google Places stats, and the Google Analytic’s stats. By changing the Places link to the keyword rich version we can see that it more than doubled the visibility.
Places & Analytics
The click-through rate stayed consistent though, and for the targeted keyword phrase the placement moved up 2 places. The downside of this listing is that it is 16 miles from the Google listed Phoenix, Az centroid, and there are over 20 businesses between the centroid and my client.
Have you seen similar or better results? Comment below:
