In the era of SEO, how you justify the premium price for domains.

Now a days you don't always need a .com domain to stay at the top of search result, since SEO
plays a important role to improve ranking.

What are your views on that matter?

 

SEO is for Google. But, we don't click "I feel lucky" always. We have our own reservations about what is good for us. And, domains can actually flip a user’s preference about 25% of the time. Ref. Microsoft's whitepaper "domain name bias".

 

There is SEO, and there is marketing. Two very different matters. One buys a short, beautiful, easy to pronounce, meaningful name not in order to improve ranking.

 

SEO does nothing on the side of a truck or a billboard. A premium quality domain name does.

 

Also in the era of SEO, there is no need to "justify" any price (no matter how high) of any domain (no matter if they are labeled "premium" or however).
The domain owner can set any price he want, it's his asset and people can think what they want about it(s price).
If someone buys it, he obviously priced it right.​

Exactlyyy
It's just the result of "brainwash" / "mass hypnosis" to think .com has a higher importance than other TLDs.
The right SEO can "manage" every TLD.

 

Yes Seo does nothing for the branding of a business. Quite often i will see a domain name on the side of a vehicle or a billboard or magazine or while watching a sporting event at a restaurant and later cannot recall the name. It was not memorable enough. Yet how much money did that company spend to place that advertisement? How is the conversion rate affected if people cannot recall what your website address is because the website developer could not see the rationale of paying for an aftermarket domain?

 

To extrapolate on this.

There is a trust factor to premium names, people are more savvy nowadays and the likes of earn-money-super-fast.whatever won't garner anywhere near the same CTR or conversion rates as EarnMoney.com via SERPS, PPC and other media campaigns. The former is the type of name you wouldn't be surprised to be redirected to as part of a zero click campaign.

The same principle applies to non .com extensions, though there are exceptions. I like .tv for example as users are used to seeing it as part of TV network ad campaigns, or cctlds which are mainstream in their relative jurisdictions. When you get in to .biz, .net there are multiple issues that arise from not owning the .com, this can also apply to cctlds. Just about every non .com extension is potentially prone to data leakage (cctlds to a lesser extend) to .com in my experience.


Last week I got an email that should have been directed to the owner of a .in domain. This had a bunch of highly sensitive information. Again there's multiple issues that arise from data leakage. Loss of business/revenue and sensitive customer data etc.

 

SEO is all.
A real example of a real business is worth a thousand words.



~ 90% of traffic comes from google.

 

Fun Fact

Most SEO's gripe about people "squatting" on domains.

Yet, they will pay a webmaster $200 USD to have their link placed on a high authority page with their desired anchor text.

In the age of fake news I think the latter is pretty despicable as well.

 

Being in the top few spots of a search result either organically or via PPC will help drive website traffic. But does everyone just blindly select the first search result? No. People will look at the page title, the text description and probably notice the domain name I would never provide credit card, bank account, social security or similar data to a .IO, .INFO, .CO or any new TLD website. Ditto for a hyphenated .Com site. A domain name is part of a business' branding and trust. A company that cannot be trusted will not get my business regardless of where they rank on Google.

 

And that my friend is called 'branding' (me think).

 

Although a three-word-domain can also be branded (depends on how company market it), but premium quality domains are more preferred by businesses as well as audience (since they are more easy to remember).

So, to answer your questions, SEO does help with the ranking, but a quality domain helps in speedy branding.

 

Brand value is number 1

 

I'll always choose to start fresh with "Brand.com", than ahead of the line with "SuperCoolBrandz.com".

People will see me coming, and move out of the way - all on their own.

 

i believe the motivation to buy a name and a good extension (.com) is for brand, image and marketing purposes.

SEO is based on content and popularity of a site - not the name domain name anymore

 

That's not a real business if 90% of traffic comes from Google. That's a "business" that can literally be wiped out with 1 update. See recent example talked about today - https://www.namepros.com/threads/home-loans-is-ranking-high-on-google.1082923/

From page 2 to 8 or 12.

 

Reminds me of riding the EMD gold rush during the late 2000's, all those long tail EMD domains taking over top 3 spots, wiped out in an instant, and all that juicy affiliate or referral revenue along with it.

 

You beat me to it. I think a lot of premium domains (particularly brandable keyword names) would have higher CTRs than non premium.

 

I believe part of the challenge of selling domain names is that developers and end users are basically newbies when it comes to domain names. They have not looked at thousands and thousands of domains nor do they have the education available by reading years of archived posts on this forum. The developer wants to bill the client $25k+ for the project and does not want to purchase an aftermarket domain which would eat into his/ her margin. So they just slap on a reg fee domain to the project and bill the client.

Alternatively you may have an end user that knows little about branding or how a premium domain can improve click through rates. Frustrated that they cannot register the most logical options they just reg the first combination which is available.

Note also that five years ago Godaddy's name suggestion tool would include premium aftermarket domains that had a keyword in the end user's search. Now they just suggest dozens of new TLD options.

 

Well premium domain names are very short and mostly in plain english. They will give you the user retention and brand power that a long one cant. The higher your competition the more you will benefit from a better domain name than the others have. And most important of all its a one time investment that will pay itself back. It has way more ROI than the hundreds of thousands some will easily drop into marketing or advertisement.

 

You are half correct. You don't need a dot com any longer to stay on top of the search results but SEO no longer plays the only important role in ranking and I would even say its weight is less nowadays due to social media.

To me, a great domain sells itself. You don't need to justify it. And you don't need a "great domain" to make a domain sell for good money, either.

I suppose a more accurate answer to "how you justify the premium price for domains" would be to choose domains that you don't need to justify as they will sell themselves.

Do the due diligence on all metrics and don't just look at SEO factors or potentials because that stuff is only part of the pie nowadays.

 

Except most premium names are keyword based and those simply are terrible for branding for the most part. When was the last time you've seen a Coffee Shop in real life just called Coffee Shop?

 

Most premium names that are purchased are actually not in use because many people don't realize how difficult it is to actually build a brand and the domain name is just a tiny part of a company's success. In the past, premium keyword domains held more value because they ranked easier and that translated to money for businesses. It was much easier to justify the price. Nowadays, that's simply not the case. Domainers often oversell the value of domain names because few domainers have ever take up the challenge of building a successful online or offline business.

 

SEO takes a long time to build up, and for most businesses will never land you on the first page of Google anyway.

In the meantime, a good domain name gets you rolling quickly, not to mention that a good business name, which should be reflected in the domain name, makes a big difference too.

If you're afraid to spend money on a good domain name, then you're afraid of success. Skimping on your web presence is the greatest mistake you will ever make.

 

Having a poor quality domain name for your business is like having a crappy sign outside your store.

its all about image!