Are you battling in the search engine rat race of search engine optimisation? Are you spending too much time and money on SEO? Are you trying to optimise for a particular keyword but not getting anywhere fast?

Then maybe you you should look at purchasing a “Generic Domain“?

What is a generic domain name?

A generic domain is a domain name with the exact search phrase that you as a internet surfer would type into your favourite search engine to find what you are looking for. For example, someone looking for a “property in Fuengirola” into www.google.co.uk – see the result below …

Unless you are a large company spending thousands each month on advertising and search engine marketing, you are NEVER going to get anywhere close to the top of the search engines, unless you have a little know how or help from someone that is good on website optimisation. Your website is probably competing against thousands of other websites in your industry and will probably never be found in the endless pit of search results.

Having a generic domain gives you a massive head start, 1) From a ranking point of view but 2) From a visitors perspective. Not everyone remembers the company that was advertising the product, but they do remember what they were searching for! So in the case above, they might not remember the companies name, but they will definitely remember that they had searched for “property in Fuengirola”.

Search engines seem to favour generic domains and they are easier to rank or position higher in the major search engines, which will generate you more traffic and traffic equals clients!

A generic domain will also holds its value as it is easily usable by anyone in the same industry as you, as long as they are marketing the same product. Compare that to a company name? Your company is very unique, you maybe be lucky enough to find one or two other companies with any exact match – however, it devalues the value of the domain name if their company is called something else! Making it much harder to market and sell.

Generic Estate Agent Domains

If you do a few searches, most of the very popular generic domains especially in your region will have been taken – if you do a little research into what are good quality search terms for the type of keywords that people search for, you may be lucky enough to find one or two that have become available again – especially as many Estate Agencies have gone out of business within the past few years.

You may also find dozens that are listed for sale, and just might be able to get the perfect one at a knock down price!

Targeting the UK market

As you may well know, from the UK if you are searching in Google, Yahoo! or Bing – the search engine defaults to the UK search page because of where you are searching from. If you are in Spain and type into your address bar www.google.com it will take you to the .es of Google (only works if you have cleared your internet history, otherwise will pick up what you last used).

UK search engines favour .co.uk domain names – so if you rely heavily on the UK market and clients, then a .co.uk may be a much better choice compared to a .com domain.

Some examples below:

Please note: Obviously, just purchasing the domain name and redirecting it to your website will not help what so ever. You are going to need to develop a unique website for your new domain name and do some search engine optimisation and marketing of your website. The purpose of this article is to inform you of the possible merits of a generic domain name and the rewards of owning one – should you market in in the right way, being the same as you would with your own company website / domain name.