Your domain name is virtual real estate. A relevant domain name will boost your Google quality score. Plus, using keywords in the destination url will also boost your quality score.
There is an old saying that the three most important things in selling real estate are location, location and location. This drives home the point that the one major concern of real estate is the location of the property. It’s the number one rule of real estate.
On the internet, real estate is the domain name. If you want to receive traffic for a particular keyword or market, you must choose the proper real estate and location. That means you want a domain name related to your keywords and market. Ideally, your main keyword or phrase should be the domain name or part of it. This will put you in the right location for your market.
Both search engines and human consumers will respond to the proper domain name. Google Adwords will reward you with higher quality scores if it can match your domain name to the keywords. Plus, Google will also boost your organic search results for your keywords if the domain is relevant.
Human visitors will assume you are more of an authority with a relevant domain. Imagine an Adwords ad where the search term is part of the domain name. The consumer will recognize your domain as targeted for their search. That will increase the likelyhood of a consumer clicking your ad.
One question with domain names is should you use dashes or underscores in your domain name. One school of thought is that the dashes or underscores will help search engines recognize individual keywords, and hopefully boost organic rankings and quality scores. The other argument is the human visitors are likely to forget dashes and underscores when typing a domain name in the browser address bar. The safest play is for you to buy both domain names, one with dashes and one without. You promote only the dashed domain name but you have the second doain in case someone types it without dashes. Domain names are less than $10 a year, so it’s well worth the price.
In Google Adwords, the destination url and display url are important as well. A domain name cannot cover every keyword for your market. You must ultimately select one keyword or phrase as you domain name. But your destination url can include the keyword as part of the path. That way you have a revelant domain name plus a path that contains the keyword. If you give each keyword and seperate destination page, then each keyword can be part of the path.
Similarly the you can put the keyword in the display url. The display url is not used for anything other than display. It has no effect on the destination url. But, since it is displayed the consumer will see it. So, using the keyword as part of the display url will make your ad more appealing. The consumer will notice your url is targeted for their search term.
Dynamic keyword insertion can be used to place the search term in the display url. It can also be used in the destination url, but it should not be used there. Adwords will not give any benefit to a url that is using dynamic keyword insertion. It is not treated as the keyword itself when determining the quality score.
Are your Adwords campaigns too expensive? Are you over paying for your Adwords traffic? Have you experienced any of the following problems using Google Adwords?
