Afraid of Getting Outranked by Big Corporate Sites? Here’s How to “Stick it to the Man”
One of the biggest fears of many domain name owners and SEO’s is working hard to choose a profitable niche, layout a strategy, buy a domain name, build a website, and then market the website only to see their success dwindle when a big company comes along and uses their considerable resources to outrank them.
Whether you are a beginning SEO working out of your dorm room or whether you are the head of a big time search marketing agency – come on, you know that you have had that thought before haven’t you? Here is one thing that you can do to alleviate some of those fears and give yourself a better night’s sleep: choose the right domain name.
“Choose the right domain name?” you say. “That is all of the advice that you have for me!?” Bear with me. Here is why.
Every Domain Name is Unique
Every single domain name is unique. No one else on the planet can have the same domain name as you.
If you build 100,000 backlinks then your Fortune 500 competitor can certainly use their vast resources to build 101,000 backlinks. If you hire a professional writing service to churn out 100 articles a day of high quality content to publish to your website then your Fortune 500 competitor could BUY a professional writing service (or a newspaper for that matter – and pretty cheap these days) and have them publish 1,000 high quality articles a day to their site.
Almost anything you do to market your site a competitor with more money and resources than you can duplicate and take to the extreme to outrank you. It sounds a little bit depressing but remember there is no free lunch in SEO just as in life. You have to work at it. SEO is best thought of as competitive webmastering because that is exactly what it is. Of course in a competition the biggest and the best (those with the most resources) usually win. Not always but usually.
Notice that I said almost in the first sentence of the above paragraph. The one thing that a Fortune 500 company with billions of dollars CANNOT duplicate is your domain name.
How the “Small Guy” Can Get A Leg Up
Imagine this scenario. Let’s say that you are a part-time SEO working for yourself out of your bedroom on a couple of vitamin websites that you own. Your biggest competitors for your target keyword of “vitamins” are huge corporate sites like GNC.com, VitaminShoppe.com, VitaminWorld.com, etc. All of these companies have vastly more resources than you. However, (drum roll please) you own Vitamins.com.
Guess what. As the owner of an exact match keyword only domain (definition) you have a sustainable advantage that any of these big competitors absolutely cannot copy (unless you sell them your domain name and of course you get to decide whether you want to sell the domain name or not).
With the weight that Google and other search engines place on a domain name that is an exact match keyword only domain to the searcher’s keyword or keyword phrase then even with limited resources working out of your bedroom you can very well outrank many of your bigger competitors based in large part on the strength of your domain name (of course, there are other factors involved and yes, you actually have to work hard at it to provide solid content and build links – remember, it’s competitive webmastering – but having the domain name that matches your target keyword exactly is half of the SEO battle).
“Stick it to the Man” by Choosing the Right Domain Name and Dominating that Niche
So what does this all mean? Am I telling you to go out and try to buy Vitamins.com or Cars.com or Loans.com? No, of course not (unless you can afford it 
). What I am telling you to do is to concentrate on finding a great domain name that is an exact match keyword only domain name to maybe a longer tail keyword in your target market and then own that keyword.
For example, I wrote a post about how to use data from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find domain names that match exactly keywords returned from the Adwords tool (Watch Me Hand Register Keyword .com Domain Names Worth More than $100). While it may not be in your budget to be able to buy Vitamins.com you can most certainly afford to pay the regular registration fee of under $10 at the registrar of your choice to buy a domain name like DailyVitaminC.com, BuyVitaminC.com, or CheapVitaminC.com each with 3,600, 1,000 and 110 average monthly Google broad match keyword searches according to the Google Adwords Keyword tool and all available for anyone to hand register as shown by entering in “Vitamin C” into our Type-In Traffic Finder Tool as of 2/25/09 at 3:05 PM EST.
You can stick it to the man. You can maintain a competitive advantage over the big corporate sites that cannot be duplicated. You can do that with the right domain name.
What do you think?
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Interesting post. I actually tried your tool out a few days ago and found just a vitamin related domain which I purchaded – immunesystemvitamins(dot)com. I haven’t developed anything on it yet, only a naked landing page. According to Adwords the phrase “immune system vitamins” is searched for about 18,000 times a month worldwide and costs $2.7 to advertise on. This should be a fairly easy domain to develop, but the competition is probably very high.
Good find. You will find that if you SEO the site fairly tightly for the keyword phrase “Immune System Vitamins” then you should eventually be able to rank pretty high for that keyword phrase if not #1. What I would do is:
1. Put the keyword phrase on the home page title tag
2. Put the keyword phrase in an H1 tag on the home page
3. Write a long and informative home page article on the keyword phrase making sure that it actually provides real value.
4. Sprinkle some natural language synonymic alternatives for the main keyword phrase into the article and in some H3 tags in the article (i.e. “vitamins for the immune system”, “immune system vitamin”, “best immune system vitamins”, etc.).
5. Use strong internal anchor text on every page of the site to link back to the home page with the keyword phrase.
Once you do that and as long as your content is strong and you provide value then after you get out of the Google Sandbox then you shouldn’t have any problems ranking very well for “Immune System Vitamins”.
Good luck and let me know how it goes!
PS A lot of times you can avoid the “Google Sandbox” issue by buying a domain that is already aged via our domain auction tool, our dropped domain tool, or our domains dropping soon tool. Either way if you do it right you will rank it will just take some time and of course quality content.
Joel,
thanks for the advice. My biggest fear with developing hand registered mini-sites is to have the domain banned/sandboxed or whatever its called. I hope building the domains in stages (iterations), related content and a few inlinks is enough.
As long as you add unique content to the site, add value to the site, and don’t engage in anything that is considered spammy or against the Google Webmaster Guidelines then there is no reason why you should ever be banned.
As far as sandboxing is concerned, sandboxing is just the unofficial name that is used when a new site doesn’t have enough trust in the eyes of Google to rank high. It does not mean that there is anything wrong with your site. I just means that you need to patiently develop your site and then as the site ages and as the links pointing to your site ages then you will gradually be seen as a more reputable and trusted site in your niche and start to rank.
Hope that this helps – Joel
Good information and helpful tools. Thanks.