This is a guest blog post written by Nora Nanayakkara, Business Development Director at Sedo. In this entry, Nanayakkara discusses the importance of domain names and how they can help raise online visibility and boost SEO within the travel sector.
It's no longer good enough to simply own a single website with the company's name in the URL, or even a collection of these URLs including common miss-spellings. To be successful online nowadays, you must be able to create a presence, build a brand and ultimately improve the reach and sales of your business. Now more than ever it is crucial that travel companies can convert customer interest into sales. An increasingly popular way of doing this is through the strategic purchase and use of keyword URLs, moving beyond simply owning the company name, to purchasing related keywords important to your business.
Plant your online flag in the ground
Online, it is crucial that travel companies are able, not only drive traffic, but also to convert customer interest into sales. Strategically selected keyword and geographic domains help drive targeted and qualified traffic to sales pages. As travellers look to research and purchase tickets to a particular destination, the domain owner can also help promote a wider range of packages or upgrades that might interest visitors. For example, a high quality, keyword domain like airtickets.com offers a high search engine ranking and gives its owner instant brand recognition with consumers looking to book and buy airline tickets.
Search engines like Google or Yahoo put significant weight on the keywords within domain names and as a result, domain names that incorporate a place name can take a website right to the top of search engine rankings. An increasingly popular consumer trend is the use of the address bar of the web browser as a search tool, typing in a keyword destination in their search for a particular subject or product. As a result, the value of keyword and geographic domains, in particular, is likely to rise.
Waking up to the benefits of ruling your domain
Geographic domain names in particular are unique and as a result, ownership allows a company to plant a stake in the ground and demonstrate clear ownership of a specialist area or destination. Recent examples of these types of domain names were included in Sedo's recent travel domain auction that took place in March, such as mallorca.eu, touring.com and holidayblog.com as just some of the available keyword domains.
The industry is clearly waking up to the importance of domain names, as Sedo has brokered over 1,000 travel-specific domain name sales in the last year alone. These have included URLs such as Jerusalem.com for $510,000, visitstockholm.com for $70,000 and Pakistan.de for €64,450. These purchases show the demand for high quality domain name key words is clearly present and that acquiring these kinds of keyword related domain names offers a number of other benefits.
Making sure your domain names are working for your business
Therefore, the message to companies wanting to stand out from the crowd is clear: while there are obvious benefits to owning your corporate domain, don't stop there! The purchase and use of relevant keyword domains can increase online traffic, deliver higher quality leads and ultimately help your brand be more successful online.
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