Working with a number of large domain portfolio holders this year, we’ve developed a methodology to help determine which domains have the most development potential. Now, we’re offering this as a free service to those who might be considering our domain development packages.

Our methodology measures and prioritizes domains in terms of their SEO potential, search competition and revenue generation potential. For a free portfolio consultation, just fill out the form and we’ll contact you to begin work on your portfolio analysis:

One of the most exciting parts of developing a site on our platform is that you can explore multiple ways to monetize your sites.

While there are standard Adsense implementations, you have full control over the format (text or banner, red or blue, etc.) as well as the placement of the ads. We leave enough flexibility in the sites so that you can add banners to your header, above/between/below posts  as well as on the sidebar and focus on developing high quality content, which helps to increase the click rates that advertisers pay, as well as attracting interest in site-targeted advertisers. With Analytics integration, you can review the performance of the ads and continue to optimize your eCPM as the traffic grows.

Beyond Adsense

In addition to implementing pay per click ads on your pages, there are two major alternative methods that combine with cost per click to help take your revenues to the next level.

The first advertising method is through cost per lead (CPL) affiliate implementations where you capture leads from interested parties and re-sell them to companies in the industry. We work with you to help implement this system and to identify programs that are paying the most for these leads. Developing a strong CPL or CPA channel can open up doors to direct advertising relationships, which are the most lucrative form and mark the beginnings of a true developed site.

Once you have built up traction in the search rankings and has authority in your vertical, we will help you develop a Media Kit so that you can recruit potential advertisers directly. Armed with your traffic data, high search rankings and experience in the vertical, your sales calls will begin with “Would you like to advertise on the site that ranks first for your industry term?” Targeted traffic and volume, more than anything else, will open up doors to advertising revenue.

Conceptualize Your Business Model

Target Market

Imagine you’re moving to a new city to open a pizza restaurant, and you have a prime piece of undeveloped real estate near the center of town. Like any smart business person, it’s important to understand both the preferences of your potential customers, as well as your competitors’ offerings. The domainers’ development dilemma can be conceptualized in much the same way: domains are store fronts upon which businesses can be built, and this is the first of several guides which aim to help you to understand the competitive landscape better through the lens of keyword research.

Importantly, while coming to understand the nature of demand from your customers based on keywords is important, you should always maintain your creative and innovative edge; content should be written to attract, engage and convert your visitors, rather than just serving the engines. Whether your domain is keyword targeted or “brandable”, you should always retain an element of creativity that will give you an edge over your competitors – moderate search volume with a high retention rate is strictly preferred to high search volume with a high bounce rate. It’s important to be patient and recognize that, over the long-run, your search rankings will depends on quality links that come from unique, well-crafted content.

Identify Targeted Keywords

Keyword Mapping

Once you’ve conceptualized your revenue strategy, it’s important to begin the actual keyword research process. For years, the Overture (Yahoo) Search Tool was the holy grail for domain research because of its breadth, but it’s been a year old since the database has been updated and recent tools have provided richer sources of data.

With a general, broad scope of your market you can identify your prime, short-tail keywords. By harnessing the collective knowledge of searchers, you can further identify a broader set of related keywords using the Google Keyword Tool, Word Tracker Research and the Microsoft adLabs Keyword Group Detection Tools. Using these tools, you can explore new related ideas for your content, which can provide data points that help you understand your potential visitors better. This guide will focus on Google-based tools, but future guides will explore AdLabs and Word Tracker further.

Based upon this initial data, you should continue to explore the keywords to identify patterns that can inform your content. While each of these data sources will have estimates of traffic volume, you should only use these are ordinal data points which can give you relative rankings, and should not be taken to reflect actual search volume. In general, Google provides the broadest measure of search data points, although all data sets can provide useful insights.

While it’s important to understand the volume of data, you should also consider the level of competition and opportunity on each of these keywords. In particular, the ideal keyword is at the intersection of high volume, targeted user intent and low competition. There are several ways to estimate these variables, but we will focus on two of the most prominent: paid search advertisers as a proxy for intent and meta titles as a proxy for organic search competition.

We user PPC advertisers as a measure of intent since these ads are judged based upon conversion potential – keywords with higher conversion potential will have greater number of advertisers. To see the number of advertisers on a given query, simple perform the keyword search on the Google Keyword Tool (you’ll want to change match type to “phrase” and order the volumes by “average search volume”) – generally, the higher the level of advertisers, the greater the commercial intent of the user (this is displayed graphically, but if you download the CSV you can get a scaled numerical estimate.)

Search Volume and PPC Advertisers on"Pizza Restaurants"

As a baseline approximation for search volume, we’ll want to identify the prevalence of a given keyword within indexed site meta-titles, which are a prime keyword targeting opportunity. To get this estimate, simple perform an intitle:“keyword” search in Google. You’ll want to gather this data for each of your targeted keywords.

In Title Search Volume

Next Steps:

Analytics Process

With an initial data set of search volume (demand), meta competition (supply) and commercial intent (PPC advertisers), you can then identify opportunities where relative demand exceeds supply. Our next guide will detail how to normalize your data to clearly identify opportunities within the search market.

Further, now that you have a baseline evaluation of your keyword market, it’s important to continue to review your incoming analytics data to identify further opportunities – this step is particularly important as you grow your site and refine your business model. In subsequent guides, we will delve further into analytics data mining.