Importance of the domain for authority site SEO?

[TheHound]

I'm going to build an authority site for a profession in the UK. The profession currently lacks a website providing useful information for people wanting to get into the profession. Search volumes are high and competition from other websites is low.
I'm trying to figure out how important the domain choice is for SEO purposes... I have two options:

Option 1 - buy exact match
I have approached the owner of the plural version (e.g. plumbers.co.uk) of the domain name and they have said they will sell for £500. The domain has been registered for 4 years. But has had no content so isn't indexed.

Option 2 - buy branded domain
Instead I could just buy an unregistered branded partial match domain (e.g. simplybuilders.co.uk) and then brand my authority site as 'Simply Builders'.

Is the £500 outlay for the domain in option 1 a sensible way to spend money?
Does google even still give ranking benefits for good domains with age?
Is there an option 3 that I haven't thought of?

For some context my calculations suggest the site could bring in £250+ per month in adsense if it achieves the authority site status.

Thanks for the help. I plan on launching a caste study for this in the Lab in the next couple of weeks.

 

[TheHound]

Option 2 would be "Simply plumbers" ... not sure why I wrote builders... too tired

 

[formysins]

You won't gain any significant SEO advantage from using the EMD but they really do stick in a consumers mind when searching and that can be invaluable when building out your brand later on.

You mentioned that you were looking at the plural version - is the singular version available? Could that be bought for less and if so, would it be suitable?

Failing that you could always test the water with the partial match domain and if its a success, go back and buy the EMD - set up a 301 and you're good to go.

Hope this helps.

 

[Calamari]

There's a very distinct and real seo advantage to owning an exact match.

If the term is valuable enough than 500 is a no brainer. Just make sure there are no crappy existing links built to it. Also, if the type of content you can post to is at all limited because of relevancey to the name I would register a new brandable name instead. It might also be useful to buy the emd and slide it into your back pocket for later.

I don't know about partial match but even if there is an seo benefit I would rather own a very brandable domain name than a spammy looking partial.

 

[thamonsta]

"Authority site" gets tossed around a lot so it depends on what you actually plan on doing with the site but if you're looking at building it to 250/mo or so (I'm just gonna leave off the currency sign like @Calamari lol) I wouldn't be in a big hurry to spend much on the domain name......

But if you're making a true authority site for plumbers in the UK (example), 500 is a small price to pay for the perfect domain name, assuming it's a popular enough profession like Plumbers.co.uk, ChimneySweeps.co.uk (lol), Doctors.co.uk... If the profession is "SocialMediaConsultants.co.uk" or something silly, I don't think it's worth the cost of admission.

Also FWIW I would take "plumbers" over "plumber", "doctors" over "doctor", etc.

Also offer them a lot less for the domain because depending on the profession that price seems like it has a ~bit~ of wiggle room in my opinion.. Are all the other extensions taken? Like .co and stuff? If you're going .co.uk you might as well look at other possibilities if you can get them for reg fee.

 

[Ryuzaki]

For the potential winnings of £250 a month.... You're talking about 2 months of earnings to have the big shot premium name. That could be worth it, but I can think of reasons that it isn't.

There are tons of examples of me being wrong here, and it's fine when you're an entirely online entity. But if you're going to have any real world branding, I'd hate to just be "Plumbers." But online only, I wouldn't mind being Plumbers.co.uk. But then what is your Brand's name? Is it Plumbers Dot Co Dot UK? It's tricky in regards to SEO and potential over-optimizations.

However... I don't think the EMD bonus is that strong any more. It's just the easiest way to keep spammers from getting boosts. The Partial Match is fine, but even then, you can have a brand name that doesn't feature the keywords at all. If you set up your URL paths correctly it'll still end up featuring the keywords.

I don't think 4 years of registry matters nearly as much as 4 years of being indexed, but I do believe there are boosts for continual registry, the first being at the year 1 mark.

For me, at this point, I'd just register some other domain and save the £500 for content or something else.

If you the overall earnings potential for the site was 10x, 100x, or 1000x what you stated, I'd only consider buying that domain. It would look pretty elite. I think even the common non-marketing person out there in the world see's a premium domain like that and understands that it totes some clout.

 

[andreint]

I'd probably register one fresh, brandable domain and use plumbers.co.uk as a parasite.

I don't know what's your end game here, or which monetization methods will you use, but I'm also in a local SMB frenzy, and I own one authority/brand domain, 1 EMD and 2 PMDs that I use to funnel the traffic back to my authority site.

It'll take some time to get all of them ranking but in the end you'll end up with a steady influx of leads & exponentially increase your authority.

 

[TheHound]

Thanks for the comments everyone. I didn't go ahead with this project in the end. If the domain is still available in 9 months or so I might have another look at it.