This post isn’t specific to this Shopify + Doba experiment I’m doing, but it’s going to be so relevant to anyone out there trying to follow in my steps that I feel it justifies itself.
Ok, you know what you want to sell. You know how important SEO is, and that choosing the right domain is going to be key. So how do you find the right domain? Here are the steps I took.
First, I had already decided on my general category–jewelry. But what kind? I knew I had to narrow it down a little. But I don’t like jewelry. I don’t like wearing my own wedding ring. I don’t like wearing a watch. I don’t like things around my neck that could get caught on something and choke me. I have daydreams about running away from terrorists, jumping a chain link fence, and my wedding ring getting caught on part of the top of the fence and my finger being ripped off. I imagine somebody cutting my finger off to steal it from me, and maybe that’s why I have a ring that is so loose it will sometimes fall off my finger with no help other than from gravity. So I don’t like jewelry, and I don’t know much about it other than having done two jewelry websites for clients, and all I really know from that is that rings come in different sizes, and people buy them on the Internet. Good enough for me for this experiment.
But now that I have to buy a domain, I know I need to get more niche than just jewelry. Well, my wedding band is white gold, maybe I can specialize in white gold. That’s good, but I still need more of a niche. This is where the Google Keyword Tool and GoDaddy (or any other domain registrar with an easy to use domain search feature) come in handy. So here’s what I did:
1. Go to Google Keyword Tool, and search for “white gold”. Don’t change any other settings, just type that in, type in the security code thingy, and go.
2. You’ll get 138 results back. Sort them by Global Monthly Search volume. If you want to know the details of what “Global Monthly Search” volume is, you can do that on your own time. Suffice it to say, it means the words with the highest numbers are searched for more than the others.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the list (the first list, not the second one they give you below the first one), and where it says “Download all keywords” click on the “text” link.
4. Open the file it gives you. Do a search and replace to remove all spaces. Now replace all line breaks with “.com” plus a line break (this will add .com to the end of every line).
5. Copy the 138 lines, and now go to GoDaddy’s bulk domain search. Paste all 138 lines in there, and click the orange “search” button.
What you’re going to get back at this point is a long list of domains that have been removed, because somebody has already bought them, and there will be a number of domains left that haven’t been chosen.
6. Delete the domain names that are just plain stupid/unusable.
7. Buy the domain(s) that seem useful to you (I bought whitegoldweddingbandsmen.com, whitegoldweddingbandswomen.com, and whitegoldweddingjewelry.com).
What if you don’t like any of the available domains? You still have some options. You can try domains with hyphens in between the words (not a big downside to doing that if you’re not planning on doing offline marketing), get a .net or .biz instead (also not a big downside, but .com’s are what most people expect, so I’d try and stick with .com’s), or you can add other words in addition to those Google suggested for you. Or add a number. Obviously whitegold.com was taken a long, long time ago, and you’ll never get it, but maybe whitegold42.com is available. What’s 42? If you’re read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy you know what it is, otherwise it’s a number without any meaning beyond what you give to it. But it allows you to get a simple, short domain with the keywords you want. SEO effect of the 42 in there? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much. One thing’s for sure, if someone actually searches for “white gold 42″ you’re going to be #1, baby.
One last option, you can always give up on that product category and try an entirely new one.
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