City+guide.com - Worth developing?

[DiggleNamer]

Let's say I wanted to develop a geo site aimed at visitors to Barcelona, with no attempt at creating an engaging portal for locals.

Is barcelonaguide.com a name that could become a destination site, or is it way weaker than barcelona.com?

Obviously you dont get the type in, but could you build it into a six figure business?

To my mind it is probably the next best thing you could get to the city name, better than barcelona.net, barcelonacity.com and barcelonaspain.com

I would welcome all thoughts!

 

[DotWeekly]

Let's say I wanted to develop a geo site aimed at visitors to Barcelona, with no attempt at creating an engaging portal for locals.

Is barcelonaguide.com a name that could become a destination site, or is it way weaker than barcelona.com?

Obviously you dont get the type in, but could you build it into a six figure business?

To my mind it is probably the next best thing you could get to the city name, better than barcelona.net, barcelonacity.com and barcelonaspain.com

I would welcome all thoughts!

Most of the time a fully developed site with good information is better then just a parked page. It will (should) get Search Engine traffic.

Now is BarcelonaGuide.com better then BarcelonaSpain.com? No! People already search for Barcelona Spain and it's likely little if any search for Barcelona Guide.

In order to make money with BarcelonaGuide.com, the site would need to provide a lot of relevant and frequently updated info on Barcelona. Then you would need to sell Ad Spots etc to gain the $$..

 

[Immo]

[city].net, [city].org, and [city].info are by far better than [city]guide.com

 

[DiggleNamer]

keywords "barcelona spain" have a wordtracker of 120

keywords "barcelona guide" has a wordtracker of zero, and ""barcelona spain guide" has a wordtracker of 8

so yes now I see why barcelonaspain.com is more valuable.i still like barcelona guide because it fits the topic of the web site perfectly, and whilst people may search for "barcelona spain" i think they are more likely to click on barcelonaguide.com than barcelonaspain.com if a guide is what they are looking for.

so considering all these factors and that barcelonaguide.com is undeveloped, what do you think it is worth?

 

[Michael]

You can build any domain into a six figure business with enough effort. I agree with Immo that a lesser tld would be better than using guide as a keyword though. Also, as Yofie pointed out, BarcelonaSpain.com would be a very strong domain as well. This is what the Adwords keyword tool reports for December with the type set to exact:

Barcelona: 135,000
Barcelona Hotels: 40,500
Barcelona Spain: 22,200
Barcelona Spain Hotels: 14,800

If you don't want to have a specific keyword like hotel, flights, etc, your next best bets in this order are: VisitBarcelona.com, BarcelonaCity.com, BarcelonaTravelGuide.com, etc. Those obviously aren't in the same league though.

Undeveloped I'd be comfortable paying low to mid $x,xxx for BarcelonaGuide.com.

 

[tetrapak]

Barcelona: 135,000
Barcelona Hotels: 40,500
Barcelona Spain: 22,200
Barcelona Spain Hotels: 14,800

Barcelona Guide: 22,200 :blink:

I'd personally develop Barcelona guide rather than Barcelona Spain. The latter is a bit repetative imho. Branding wise Barcelona Guide is much better too.

 

[footodors]

wordtracker is as accurate as a monkey throwing darts. I really can't figure out how they come up with their figures.
Google says per month:
barcelona guide 3,600
barcelona tourist guide 390
barcelona travel guide 1,000
barcelona hotel guide 73
barcelona guides 480

so barcelonaguide.com would be very nice.

 

[DiggleNamer]

Thanks, this thread has been very instructional to me. I had no idea Wordtracker was so fallible. I will use the Google tool from now on.

I agree with tetrapak on the branding value of barcelonaguide.com.

 

[tetrapak]

wordtracker is as accurate as a monkey throwing darts. I really can't figure out how they come up with their figures.
Google says per month:
barcelona guide 3,600
barcelona tourist guide 390
barcelona travel guide 1,000
barcelona hotel guide 73
barcelona guides 480

I can't figure how you come up with these figures.. Actually I can Don't forget to select "all countries and territories" instead of just your own country or a selected country. Every search counts if it is in english, isn't it.

 

[owntype]

BarcelonaGuide.com is way much better than BarcelonaSpain.com and BarcelonaCity.com in commercial advertising.

Barcelona.net worths much more than BarcelonaGuide.com in resell market but you'd better stay with a .com domain for a serious development and marketing. Barcelona.net can be a good supplement/backup domain to BarcelonaGuide.com (if you have the budget), but if you put the budget (to secure Barcelona.net) in advertising BarcelonaGuide.com, it can possibly bring your business to its next level.

You can't go wrong with a nice, keywords rich and memorable .com domain for a serious business.

Other .com domains you can choose from:
BarcelonaTravel.com
BarcelonaTravelGuide.com
VisitBarcelona.com
AboutBarcelona.com

Good luck with your project

 

[Traveler]

I will be creating a similar site in the future (I live in Barcelona) and I think BarcelonaGuide.com would be a great name and I for one would chose it over BarcelonaSpain.com.

 

[pcp]

I noticed recently that samoa.travel is run by the Samoa Tourism Authority (at least according to the site).
I was surprised they chose that extension.

 

[Michael]

Barcelona Guide: 22,200 :blink:

I'd personally develop Barcelona guide rather than Barcelona Spain. The latter is a bit repetative imho. Branding wise Barcelona Guide is much better too.

Sorry, but I don't have the slightest idea where you got that figure from. Using the Adwords tool with "Exact" search type it comes up with 320 searches for "Barcelona Guide" for December. Even if you put the type to "Broad" which I didn't do above, it only has 3,600 searches (Barcelona Spain has 360,000 if you set the type to Broad). "Barcelona Spain" crushes "Barcelona Guide" from a search perspective, no ifs ands or buts about it. Even from a branding perspective city+country.com is way easier for me to remember than city+keyword.com.

 

[tetrapak]

Michael read my last post. Btw that number is avg. not for December.

 

[Michael]

Michael read my last post. Btw that number is avg. not for December.

Ok, even so, you can't compare apples to oranges. Doing all countries with broad search type you have "Barcelona Guide" with 22,200 avg. but "Barcelona Spain" with 673,000 avg. Like I said, it doesn't even come close.

 

[tetrapak]

Numbers are correct yes. To be honest other than American state + city sites I've never really seen good developed Country + city.com sites. Could you give some examples? If you search for Spain Barcelona in Google you will not find any sites with these two keywords in the domain. The reason is simple. People who type in these two words want to make sure that the city they are searching for is in that specific country. Now if you have a website about Barcelona it will surely contain Spain as keyword, not once but multiple times, hence it will show up in Google. I've made my point clear, I would never develop such domain, as branding wise it sucks. What its worth to other domainers is another thing..

 

[Immo]

Barcelona Spain:
Estimated Avg. CPC :: $4.14
Approx Avg Search Volume :: 49,500
December :: 201,000

Barcelona Guide:
Estimated Avg. CPC :: $0.97
Approx Avg Search Volume :: 2,400
December :: 2,400

Visit Barcelona:
Estimated Avg. CPC :: $1.04
Approx Avg Search Volume :: 1,600
December :: 1,300

In terms of quality (search volume/ppc) there is a big gap... However, VisitBarcelona and BarcelonaGuide are better than BarcelonaSpain in terms of brandability.

Remember VisitFlorida(dot)com sold for $186,000 in Aug 04 (Approx Avg Search Volume :: 5,400 only)

Both BarcelonaGuide and BarcelonaSpain are low/mid $x,xxx names IMO.
As a Webmaster/SEO Optimizer, I'd certainly prefer BarcelonaSpain over BarcelonaGuide.

 

[DiggleNamer]

I think this has been a very interesting thread, and is helping me clear a few ideas in my mind.

For my fellow geo enthusiasts: www.suttontown.com is available to reg as of this post - it's a town of 8,000 in MA if anyone fancies trying their hand at a micro geo.

So what do you think of a geo where the word town is added? It is a bit redundant, but I don't think disasterous from a brand perspective?

 

[vitalir]

Brandability VS Keyword-richness is always a tough question...

 

[CoMp1eX]

To me, it depends on the strength of the keywords.

If there's better keywords than yours, than go for the "brandability".

It will benefit you in the long-run if you get big.