Josh Bourne ⬥ 21 December
Just four more days until Christmas. People are finishing up their shopping, wrapping gifts and, apparently, looking for Christmas online.
According to Compete, traffic to the domain name Christmas.com increased by over 243 percent in November. There is no real content on Christmas.com, just a bunch of pay-per-click advertisements. The domain has never been marketed, and because it hosts no unique content and has not been SEO’d, it ranks poorly in searches for the term “Christmas.” But because it is such a category-defining domain name, it still receives a significant amount of type-in traffic, particularly during the holiday season. Based on Compete’s graphic representation of the December 2009 performance, type-in traffic to Christmas.com will spike several hundred percent more this December.
When keyword domain names are used properly, they are capable of garnering huge amounts of traffic because they are so intuitive and much of that traffic is organic. For example, there are over 30 million broad searches for the term “Christmas” per month around this time of year. If the Christmas.com domain was ranked well, like it could be, the site could earn around 15 percent of organic click-throughs, or 450,000 visitors a month. It would cost an advertiser approximately $500,000 per month to access an online audience this size through sponsored advertising.
People navigate to Christmas.com not because they are directed there by a specific company, but because they expect to find Christmas-related content based on the domain. Companies should realize this potential and consider adding keyword domains to their portfolio of branded domain names.
Tags: advertisements, branded domain names, Christmas, Compete, domain names, keyword domain names, Pay-Per-Click, Search, SEO