Domains, Domain Names For Sale & Domain Name Registration

Domain name SEO week 4; gauging the weight of an undeveloped .com in the SERPs

I was sifting through my domains last night, and came across one I purchased a few months ago but haven’t done anything with yet. It struck me a funny that it happened to be ranking first page for its exact name, considering the market it lies within and the fact that absolutely no link building or SEO at all has been performed. Its still parked with 1&1, not even on their affiliate scheme!…In this week’s issue of Domain Name SEO I am going to have a look at why the domain OnlineReputationAgency.com is ranking on the first page for “Online Reputation Agency” and what factors are being taken into account if any to return it in this particular position in the SERPs.

As you can see below “Online Reputation Agency” returns 5,340,000 results, most notably with sites like Marketing Pilgrim coming up in the top few results.

Scanning down the page however, we can see my domain OnlineReputationAgency.com indexed as a parked page on 1&1:

Furthermore it appears many other search agencies and online reputation companies are further down the rankings. When looking on adwords it appears there is no data for the search term “online reputation agency” even on broad, I find this quite hard to believe considering the similarities between online marketing/search agencies and online reputation management companies. I am intrigued to find out if any of the companies listed above my domain have received any traffic for this term. Obviously if they have not, Google adwords is accurate and the weight of an undeveloped .com domain is enough to justify a first page placement in the eyes of google. A similar instance has occurred with OptimisedContent.com, searched 46 times per month.

This leads me onto the question, how competitive does a search term have to be before the weight of the .com is no longer able to maintain a first page ranking without having some form of development or search engine optimisation performed on it? On the same note is it possible to measure the amount of optimisation required using adwords as a guide?

I intend to find out and report back…so as usual, any comments would be appreciated.

Many Thanks

Gary

Tags: Domain Name SEO, Domains, Google Adwords, SERPs