Many believe that buying domain names or urls is as profitable as it has ever been, while others believe that they have lost their value. While there are good arguments for both, in this article I would like to talk about a very common question I get from my customers. “I have purchase several domain names, what should I do with them?” We will discuss why companies buy extra domain names and ideas on what you can do to get value from your extra domain names.

Why Do Companies Buy Extra Domains

Companies should buy domain name for 2 reasons. First to make money, second to protect their business.

Buy Keyword Rich Domain

The common reason people buy domain names to make money now is to buy “keyword rich domains”. A keyword rich domain name is one that has a popular phrase related to a service offered by a business. For example, if I am a plumber that offers repair services, I might want to purchase the url plumberrepair.com.  By purchasing this domain name companies try to increase their likelihood of being on the first page of search engines when people search for the term “plumbing repair”. Here are a couple of things to consider when you are trying to buy website addresses for your company.

• When trying to buy a keyword rich domain name, try to get the most popular keywords. Use a keyword tool to find out what are the most popular keywords in your industry
• Think quality not quantity. It’s not about having the most domain names, it is about having the best ones.
• Consider geo-targeted domain names. Sometimes the most popular keyword phrases have been purchased already, but adding your local city may give you a better chance at landing well searched urls. This comes with an added benefit for contractors and service companies, because it allows them to target local cities.

Protect Company With Reputation Management

The first rule of reputation management is to get rid of the low hanging fruit. If someone wanted to try to harm your business, the easiest thing they could do is write a bad review. The second easiest thing they would do is build a site about your business with any variation of your domain name. Either dot.com, dot.co.nz, dot.biz, dot.info, or dot.net could be used to defame your business and could potentially generate traffic fairly quickly in the wrong hands. For this reason, it is encouraged that you purchase all variations of your domain name and point them to your site. The best way to point these domain names to your site is with what’s called a 301 redirect. For more information, click here – https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633.

Some companies buy an additional domain because their company url is too long to type quickly. So they purchase a shorter one to use on business cards, billboards, radio ads, commercials and other advertising.

Lastly, companies take various country versions – dot.co.nz, dot.com.au, dot.co.uk because they plan on expanding to those markets

What Is The Best Thing To Do With Extra Domains

Now that we have talked about why people buy great domain names, it is very important to talk about a safe way to use domain names without getting a penalty from search engines. There is no easy way to make money with any domain name. The reason for this is because search engines will not allow you to have the same information on multiple domains (For more information, take a look at “Duplicate Content” in Google Quality Guidelines – https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769).  However, there is no penalty for having a second, or third website.  Now more than ever companies  are learning to invest in separate websites.

Let me explain.

Did you notice that Google owns Youtube.com, and Gmail.com? Have you ever thought about why they don’t just have them all on one website. Yes part of the reason is because they acquired companies, but another reason is because they each have completely different purposes.

Many companies provide services that they offer that are unrelated to the other. These companies may benefit from creating a second website that will focus primarily on 1 of these unrelated topics. For example, a handyman may have a website, but he may have a second website for junk removal from items he gets from customers getting rid of things. Or a basement remodeling company, that has a website specializes in making custom bars. Or a mobile car wash, that also has a website on pressure washing of homes. In each of these cases, having an additional website with a keyword rich url can really make a difference.  Many times having a keyword rich url will increase click through rates and improve your conversions.