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Would you start an online shop on a HYPHENATED exact match product domain? (EMD)

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Arca

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A friend of mine is in the process of setting up a small (one-person business) online shop in the women’s accessories niche, and I’m helping her acquire a domain name for her business. The shop will sell different variations of the same product, which is a form of body jewelry for women. This product is just starting to get popular, and there are currently very few shops selling it, and all of them have been operating for 2 years or less.

Since its a relative new product, the EMD was hand registered just last year, and a small design agency owns both the plural and the singular version, and they forward it to their website. The plural form of the product keywords (some similar combinations would be "plastic bracelets", "flannel sweaters", "quartz rings", "metallic sunglasses") gets 22K searches per month on average, according to Google keyword planner (it’s rising each month, as this product is becoming increasingly more popular, and in the last few months it got about 40K searches per month), while the singular version gets about half of that.

I approached the owner of the EMD domains with a budget of $3000 for either the singular or the plural form, but he responded that the domains are not for sale at any price, so those are not an option.

Personally I think a nice keyword brandable would be the best option in this case, but due to the nature of the keywords there are only a few suffixes that work well in a "first keyword"+"suffix" combination, and all are not for sale, or priced too high.

Recently I caught the hyphenated EMD of the product name ("keyword-keyword.com"). I know there are a lot of drawbacks to hyphens in domains, but considering that she was willing to pay $3000 for the non-hyphenated version of the domain, would it still be worth it start a business on the hyphenated version?

At the moment she is basically considering two options: "Keyword"+"Shop".com and the hyphenated EMD. Due to the lack of other options, she really prefers the latter, since the competition is still low in this niche, and she is hoping that by using the EMD she can get more organic traffic from people searching for the product. She is aware that EMDs are not as powerful as they used to be in the past, in terms of SEO, but considering the low competition and the increasing amount of searches for the keyword, she hopes that it will help her get organic traffic. Any thoughts/advice on this? Would it be okay to go with a hyphenated domain in this case, in order to get the EMD, or would it be better to look for another alternative? Since she is quite set on the hyphenated EMD, I guess this might also be phrased as; would you strongly recommend not going with the hyphenated EMD in this case?
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
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I definetly not recommand going for hyphenated domain, ESPECIALLY if she wants type-in (organic) traffic, you can also try buying "buy" + "niche" domain (example: buytshirts.com, buycheapbooks.com), I would recommand you contact multiple domain owners, check how many searches their domain keywords receives and depending on their pricing, buy the one you think is the best domain at the best price, also if she's curious it may park the domain for few days to see how much traffic that domain receives.
 
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I definetly not recommand going for hyphenated domain, ESPECIALLY if she wants type-in (organic) traffic, you can also try buying "buy" + "niche" domain (example: buytshirts.com, buycheapbooks.com), I would recommand you contact multiple domain owners, check how many searches their domain keywords receives and depending on their pricing, buy the one you think is the best domain at the best price, also if she's curious it may park the domain for few days to see how much traffic that domain receives.
Thanks for your advice:)

I should have been more clear when I said organic traffic - she hopes that it can help her get organic search engine traffic (rather than type-in visitors).
 
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It's not a problem for organic search.
 
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