How 50 Businesses Leverage Premium Domain Names

Just as “location, location, location” matters most in brick-and-mortar real estate, “domain name, domain name, domain name” can make or break your business on the Internet. The right domain name offers instant traffic and branding advantages.

• Organic search-engine traffic. Search engines tend to rank sites with keywords in the domain name higher in organic search listings than those without.

• Paid search-engine traffic. When deciding which PPC ads to click, users evaluate the domain names to determine which companies are most relevant. They are more likely to click URLS containing their desired search terms.

• Direct-navigation traffic. Many domain names receive significant traffic from users who bypass search engines altogether by typing a keyword plus “.com” or “.net” into the Web-browser’s address bar. The strongest domain names can enjoy hundreds of thousands of visits each month from this “direct-navigation” or “type-in” traffic.

• Branding. The right category-defining domain name builds a strong brand identity, positioning its owner at the top of the food chain in respect to the manufacturers, distributors, retailers, service providers, publications or associations it competes against for market share.

Here’s how a cross-section of companies – large and small – use the power of premium domain names to promote their brands, build traffic and drive revenue.

* Data gathered from publicly available sources, such as Alexa.com and Google.com, as of September 2009. The companies listed above had no role in the complation of this report. No endorsement of or by any of the above entities or involvement in any listed transaction should be inferred.