beljf123 said:
By the way how do you guys appraise your .pro domain ?
Say I was appraising Surf.pro, I would go to Google and put in;
SurfPro - This would help me gauge the association between Surf and Pro. There are 136,000 indexed pages with Surf and Pro together. That's pretty good.
ProSurf - Same as above but different way round. Not as relevant as the above but still useful. 563,000 indexed results so an even stronger association this way round. The average is only 20,000-30,000 for these 2 tests.
"Professional Surfer" - With quotes. This gauges the level of professional association with what I would describe as the "full" keyword Surfer. It comes up with 77,000. Not bad, there are stronger category associations, for example "Professional Chef" has over 500,000 and Chef.pro sold for $3,650. "Professional Golfer" has 300,000. 77,000 is OK.
Surf Vs Surf Pro Vs Surf Professional - I like to compare the Google uniques for the keyword on it's own versus with Pro and with Professional. I'm interested in the ratios. For example, Surf has 111m uniques, 3m for Surf Pro, and 12m for Surf Professional. They are good numbers, especially if you bear in mind that some meanings of surf (eg. Surf the Internet, Surf & Turf) don't have a professional context and are dragging down the pro and professional ratios. It's another gauge of pro and professional association.
allinurl:surf - This tell me how popular a keyword is in developed web site URL's. There are 4.5m pages with Surf in the address. That's about double skate, which is what I would expect. Surf has a useful double meaning, Surfing a wave and surfing the Internet. That is probably boosting the URL result which is a good thing. I like keywords with double meanings, it means you are buying 2 domains for the price of 1. For example, I bought Pool.pro a couple of weeks ago. That could be pool as in the game or a swimming pool.
allinurl:surf.com - Similar to above but I'm trying to cut out URL's where the surf is after the .com as a folder or page reference. About 285,000 results, again not bad. You have be careful that there isn't a page heavy .com site developed because that will skew the result. For example allinurl: overstock.com comes out with 3.4m results but if you look at the results it's picking up mostly Overstock.com pages. Rather than create their pages on the fly from a database, they seem to have them all hard coded or set up as subdomains and Google indexes them separately. Just because this figure is low, doesn't mean the keyword isn't valuable. For example, when I bought Diamond.pro, I found Diamond had a relatively modest 90,000 Google indexed results for allinurl: Diamond.com but that's probably because not everybody can set up a website selling diamonds, it must be expensive to buy the stock and the wholesale diamond market is relatively small and close-knit.
These allinurl stats help me gauge how much competition there is for a keyword. The more competition, the better. It means there won't be many strong .coms around at reasonable prices, people will be developing weaker 2 and 3 word .coms, and they are more likely to consider strong generic alternatives.
Also, from a development angle it helps. For example, there are 5.6m indexed page references with Guide.com in and 420,000 with Guide.info in, end users will be familiar with these types of sites being developed on alternative extensions and won't be phased by it. This was a concern for me when I bought Diamond.pro, I figured there were alot of good diamond.com sites unregged or for sale because of the low allinurl: diamond.com figure. It also made me wonder whether end users would accept a diamond site on .pro because there will have been little spillover into alternatives and you need credibility to sell a diamond online because of the cost and emotional significance of the purchase. I still bought it, I figured .pro sounds more credible than alot of other alternatives so if credibility is a consideration, I should go for it.
As well as just the Google indexed page results, I'm also interested in the quality of the sites on the first couple of pages, the number of sponsored ads, and the strength of the site names. Site name strength is a double edged sword, it could mean developers and end users prefer single generic names, or if the names are weak, it might mean that you don't need a strong URL in that particular field, or at least developers don't think they do, which will make a sale in .pro less likely. Or it might mean there is mileage in combining the SEO and site design quality with a more brandable and memorable name.
One of my considerations when I bought Rates.info was that the biggest players in the UK comparison market; MoneySupermarket.com, CompareTheMarket.com, and MoneySavingExpert.com have weak .com names. For a new entrant, Rates.info would arguably be more memorable and save users typing up to 11 letters. On the flipside, it could mean provided you have the lowest unbiased rates, people don't care about the name. Again, that could still work for an alternative extension like .info.
Next I would compare results from Estibot.com and DomainScore.com. I don't have a conventional PPC Overture .com domainer mindset so this helps me see things as a .com domainer might. My focus has always been on alternatives so I attach more weight to goodness of fit. Fit isn't an issue with .com, domainers are focused on the weight of the keyword only. I put little reliance on auto valuation tool absolute valuations but they can be brilliant at benchmarking. For example, Estibot values Surf.pro at $1,300 and Skate.pro at $650. Surf.pro cost me about twice what Skate.pro cost so that's pretty accurate benchmarking. I think Estibot works better for .coms than alternatives in terms of absolute value because .com values derive from the keyword alone.
Domainscore is similar to Estibot apart from you get an indexed relative valuation. Surf.pro scores 478 versus 457 for Skate.pro. Again, that backs up my view that Surf.pro is stronger than Skate.pro.
Another tool I use is a keyword list. It has 17,500 popular keywords on and has PPC and Overture type benchmarks. Again, it's just a benchmarking exercise, I often look at where the keyword ranks out of 17,500 for PPC and Overture. For example, Skate and Surf are ranked between 1,500-2,000 for Overture. That would suggest that if you were regging based on Overture they should be in the first 1,500-2,000 .pros regged. They were regged on 2 March 2005 so they probably were in the first 1,500-2,000 .pros regged so that's pretty accurate.
Next, I like to look at keyword bids on Sedo and historic sale prices on dnsaleprice.com or namebio.com. If the .biz is for sale on Sedo, I like to see alot of bids on it, I think there are some parallels between what works in .biz and what works in .pro for business and employment related keywords. I don't think there is the same parallel for sports and hobbies. Surf.mobi has 11 bids, that was a positive, especially because I think Surf works better with .pro than .mobi. The only point to bear in mind here is that the 11 bids might all be at $200 or something with no bids like Quotes.com has no bids because the seller has set a huge minimum bid and nobody has bid over it, I'm using this as an example because I heard the seller wants $10m for it.
For historical prices, I'm interested in how many times the keyword has sold on it's own in alternative extensions. I also like to see weak 2-3 word .coms containing the keyword selling for alot of money (eg. BlogSurf.com $19,873). Also, I like to see the word selling for alot of money in .com, that means the .com is out of the game permanently so anybody who wants the keyword will have to buy it in an alternative. Volume of historical sales is also very important, I like keywords which have pages and pages of historical sales, ideally with some in alternative extensions.
Finally, I consider the domain as a whole, focusing on general fit between the keyword and .pro extension, commercial use and wow factor. For Surf.pro you have the sport and hobby angle which works very well with .pro, Surf.pro could sell boards, accessories, or holidays, which are relatively high value items with a nice margin from a business angle. Finally, wow factor, I know .com domainers will laugh at me talking about wow factor in the context of .pro, but it makes the difference between an average sale and a premium sale. For alternative extensions like .pro, wow factor is a combination of goodness of fit and commercial attractiveness. The biggest wow factor .pro domains are Golf.pro and Poker.pro. Surf.pro and Skate.pro aren't in the same league but they have a wow factor.
