What is An Exact Match Domain (EMD)?
I am a huge fan of “plucking” the low-hanging fruit and doing the obvious before looking for complex solutions to help a website’s SEO. One such solution is using an EMD or an Exact Match Domain.
This is a simple concept – just use a relevant keyword with decent traffic in your domain name. Ideally, this keyword should also be used on every page/post. Over time, as you build up your site authority, you can expect to get “free clicks” as potential leads search for that keyword.
So, how do you set you an EMD? For this, you will need to use a domain registrar with a bulk registration tool. Typically, I use register-spot.com. There are many other domain registrar’s that you can use as well.
This is How You Can Get An Exact Match Domain (EMD)
Step 1: Start off by doing a quick keyword research. We recommend Moz for this. Moz is a paid keyword research tool but well worth it. When you input a keyword in Moz, you will get the following parameters: Traffic, Difficulty Level, Organic CTR, and Priority. While the first three parameters are self-explanatory, the last category, Priority takes into account the cumulative effect of the first three categories.
Ideally, these should be the category values for a particular keyword:
Traffic: Try to look for a keyword with a monthly traffic of at least 1,000. If you rank #1 for that particular keyword, you can expect a 20%-30% CTR – which means 200-300 clicks every month.
Difficulty Level: Avoid picking any keyword with a difficulty level of greater than 30. It is very difficult for new businesses to rank well for a high difficulty keyword.
Organic CTR: This should be greater than 60%. If the keyword relates to an educational topic, you can even expect a CTR of as high as 90%. So, if a keyword has an organic CTR of 90% and a monthly traffic of 1,000, 100 visitors every month are clicking on paid ads. Whereas, 900 visitors are pulling in traffic organically.
Priority: Like I said, this category takes into account the cumulative effect of the above three categories.
Step 2: Go to Register-Spot
Step 3: In the top menu bar, click on Domains>Bulk Registration
Step 4: Paste all the shortlisted keywords here. You also have the option of selecting your domain extension. SEO-wise, it is preferable to go for a domain name with a .com, .net or .org extension.
Step 5: You can see a list of all available domains here. For instance here, you can see that “adsagency.net” was the only available domain name. Next proceed to checkout.
This is the same strategy that we have used for our website, www.seobusinessagency.com. The keyword here being “seo business agency”. With the passage of time, as we push out more and more content and build up our site authority, we expect to pull in good traffic for this particular keyword.
Hope this helped!
