Exact match domains: how powerful are they?

Morning IM's,

I was wondering how powerful are exact match domains in a competitive niche?
Can a new exact match domain rank out competitors with DA +80?

Thanks for sharing your experience !
As always it's highly appreciated!

With the right SEO, exact match domains are theoretically more powerful. However, it will take you more time to build up trust under a new domain.

Yes you can but you also need quality backlinks to beat them.

Hi,

EMD is powerful and it can compete with good authority site but not for long

You have to increase your EMD domain authority to sustain in Page #1 by doing SEO practice.

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/08/12/emds-vs-branded-domains

I stopped using EMDs in 2016 for some reasons. OP you will get answer when you will try to rank it.

An Exact Match Domain (EMD) is a domain name that precisely matches a search term that will likely drive more traffic to your website.

First of all, it could be considered a sign of a spammy website if its URL exactly matches a search term. If you type "watch movies for free" websites appear on SERP when you search for the keyword phrase.

Then, Google rolled out on low-quality EMD sites and Former Google Head of Webspam Matt official announced on Twitter.

"Algorithm change meant to reduce the amount of low-quality exact match domains in search results."
"New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin."

If you’re a low-quality site, with an exact match domain and you’re engaging in spammy tactics – then you should definitely worry. But if you are thinking to build like an authority site.

Please goahead and check below some more information for your reference:

Before the start with EMD. Please consider this.
1. Keyword domains (EMDs) rank on average 11% - 15% higher than branded domains.
2. Brand (non-EMD) domains needed an average of 40k quality backlinks (Based upon your niche) to hit Top 10.
3. Keyword domains were able to reach Top 10 with half as much content, and only using the keyword half as frequently.

Then, I have mentioned SEOs expert words regarding EMD:
"‘Keyword in the domain name’ as an SEO tactic has lost its influence over recent years." - Marcus Tober (Founder)

"Even if exact match domains (EMDs) were given some kind of boost it’s only for one main keyword and when the vast majority of SEO traffic is long tail keywords that isn’t going to help very much." - Altoft

"If you can build a brand long-term – and get in some quicker wins to capitalize on extra organic traffic and double search engine listings in the meantime – providing you can justify the returns on your effort, why wouldn’t you do this?" - Kevin (Blueglass)

It’s also very important to remember that Google wants to bonus reward for brands – this means that they look for common brand signals such as backlinks, anchor text ratios, brand query volume, social media engagement, CTRs and bounce rate (from SERPs) and much more – and when they find the perfect mix of these google factors, I think it will be much harder for exact match domains to benefit from increased coverage.

If you have any other questions. Simply reply to me.

Obviously EMD makes your main keyword as your Brand Name so it becomes easy to rank.

It doesn't make the user feel comfortable. but if your really have good stuff and with correct SEO, yes it can be a success just as another domain.

but in general i will avoid such cases.

As someone mentioned above theoretically it has an advantage and yes it does in reality but that comes handy when you have done SEO correctly.

Yes it will help since the website should also contain . But if the KW is super competitive, you may never even be able to rank for brand searches. So I would suggest to do only low to mid comeptitive keywords EMD.

If you are good at SEO, yes you can

Thanks all for your positive replies! Cleared things up for me a lot. Thanks again!

Bigdadddy said:

Obviously EMD makes your main keyword as your Brand Name so it becomes easy to rank.

Click to expand...

Not true nowadays

A couple emds I owned and sold been deranked

Exact match domains are definitely preferred over regular domains because Google considers them more relevant. Even parasites with keyword in title rank nowadays. So, it's not cost-effective to purchase a domain for a keyword. It's better to build a branded domain and pass link juice using google properties and parasites.

depends on the niche (if there is more competition, and if there is less)... it's also depends on whether it is a single word or phrase.

It's really powerful nowadays. But be sure that do not produce low quality content on your site.

If you do, you will get penalty from Google...

Been working on an EMD for the last few months for local niche. Not ranking that well at the start, but breaking top 20 for some terms now and getting clicks. Just gonna keep working it. You do have to be careful of over optimizing. That's what concerns me about the EMD.

Honestly, this will likely be my last EMD. I'll go with partials from now on.

Like fullyniche mentioned. EMD adds an extra layer of responsibility to show your site is credible.

It is not powerful at all. You could benefit by using EMD on Bing and Yahoo but there is very minimum traffic coming from these search engines. There was a time when EMD was a big thing in google too but not anymore. Its better to use a branded domain.

I have seen working it in 2 ways. When it is standard keyword, lets say "best dog food in ca", the EMD does not work so well
but if your keyword is Product name or project name, then it works very good and will rank you. product name mean any new launched product and project name example could be any real estate project

Snowwhite007 said:

Morning IM's,

I was wondering how powerful are exact match domains in a competitive niche?
Can a new exact match domain rank out competitors with DA +80?

Thanks for sharing your experience !
As always it's highly appreciated!

Click to expand...

wew. how old the domain sir? I still use EMD. and EMD is power full for domain branding. I gues google only deacreasing the power 2-3%. but its still works i guess so