Expired domain strategy for E-commerce sites

Henny10 said:

Looking for suggestions people.

I have a small e-commerce site selling consumer electronics (3-4 products). Revenue in the best month was around $700k (market peak) but it has settled down to around $160k per month.

Net profit margins are around 30% after all is said and done, VAT (sales tax), fulfillment, product costs, ads, 1 staff member for CS and other incidentals.

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I kick myself a little bit because I think I have approached the opportunity all wrong and left a lot of money on the table.

I built out a site on WP/Woocommerce and tried to use blog posts to drive traffic to those posts which then lead to the product page.

Fresh domain, DR6 now after a little bit of link building. Homepage is starting to rank for some good KW's but we're talking small traffic numbers - ALL OF MY SALES COME FROM GOOGLE ADS.

If I could do this all over, I would buy a powerful expired domain and build out a standard format e-commerce store, with category pages being the target for my SEO efforts.

I don't think I wouldn't even add a blog to the site. Google doesn't seem to care about blog posts in my niche - the SERPs are all category pages for e-commerce stores.

Very important lesson for me as a novice SEO - you can do as much KW research as you want BUT YOU NEED TO LOOK AT THE SERPs - what is Google ranking?

Anyway - I'm thinking of purchasing a powerful domain to do what I think I should have done first time around. The current site will keep going too.

There is a particular keyword I want to chase with high commercial intent, rated as Medium (16) difficulty on Ahrefs, and the SERP is category pages for e-commerce stores with DR of 50-70, so I'm going to need some power.

I'm happy to be VERY aggressive with this new site because I will have the safety net of the original site.

Does anyone have any advice for me? I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who has gone through the process of ranking an ecom site in a competitive niche.

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shabanarif12 said:

Can you guide about the niche selection for ecom ? Do you dropship or have stock?

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Henny10 said:

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out. A lot of good information in there.

Taking time to plan structure is something I definitely didn't do properly the first time around. Thinking that over for a couple of days would have been so worth it.

I'll be giving that, and many of your other points some serious attention on the next site.


No I keep all of my stock on hand. Or at least, the 3PL does these days.

Very tough in the beginning as I was only able to buy in a small amount of stock (£10k-£15k) at a time, and ran out of stock a couple of times as I couldn't get fresh stock into the country quickly enough.

Fortunately, there were industry-wide shortages of stock and so for a 2-3 week period I was able to sell a high volume of goods and hold off customers because every one else was suffering the same issue and it wasn't like my customers could get the goods any faster elsewhere.

All in all it was a very fortunate situation, and the proceeds from the weeks where no-one had any stock allowed me to make much larger ($500k approx.) orders with my manufacturers.

Stock isn't an issue any longer.

I sympathise with anyone starting out as it's incredibly difficult to get the capital required to buy in stock, and everyone thinks you're crazy.

My preference is always to hold stock rather than dropshipping

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Henny10 said:

I'm still curious as to how you can be so sure that an aged domain won't work.

Have you had any experience building sites on aged domains? I'm sure there are lots of people who don't do it properly and then don't get results.

I don't mean to start an argument but your messages read like someone who has read a lot but not necessarily done a lot. No offence.

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duckquackingmullard said:

I already explained about the relevancy....[INSERT REST OF LONG NEBULOUS RANT HERE]

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• Top 5 Whey Protein Powders for 2022
• Best Non-Stimulant Pre-Workout Powders
• Top 3 Men's Multi-Vitamins for Athletes

• Best Multi-Vitamin for Men Over 40
• Best Multi-Vitamin for Teenagers
• Top Multi-Vitamin for Men Who Exercise
• What to Look For in a Quality Multi-Vitamin
• Benefits of Taking a Multi
• etc.

shazami said:

@Henny10 congratulations on your progress

the Shopify suggestion is great, even it has a cost,
they have a track record of good seo on the ecommerce they handle
so you'll have a surge if you move to them
there are some freelance who offer services to transfer from WP to shopify, better let some guys who already done it to handle that
the thing i dont like about shopify is the cost of all these addons,

a 2 websites approach work like a charm, you can transfer your actual website to shopify
and develop a blog on a strong domain targeting the best buying keywords,
you can integrate shopify cart into your new website(the checkout will be handled on your shopify address)
this way you will find it easy to work on your seo, Shopify is not recommended to publish content (too much code needed for simple formating)

i may have a domain that can suit you, it was an ecommerce a few years ago, and have strong backlinks according to hrefs
you can pm me if interrested,
i can not pm you for whatever reason??


all the best
Hal

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J1218 said:

So the answer is "no" Mr. Duck, you haven't had any actual experience with aged domains or the majority of what you're attempting to give advice on. Sharing your thoughts is fine, but at least be open to the fact that you might be wrong. It's intellectually dishonest to be this obstinate and intransigent on a topic that you don't have any personal experience with.

@Henny10 It sounds like you have the ads/paid traffic strategy dialed in pretty well on your current site, so I see 2 potential options for you to explore with an aged domain:

1. The first is the obvious and what you already alluded to, which is simply finding a highly relevant domain and doing proper 301 redirects to your current site to see if you can get some SEO benefit. There are plenty of threads here on how to set that up, and you seem like you know what you're doing anyway, so I probably don't need to spend anymore time on this one.

2. This is probably the option I would test out since it doesn't risk your current site at all. You could get an aged domain and build it out into its own informational/authority-style site in the industry, target and get it ranked for all of the same money keywords as you're targeting on your e-com site, then drive the traffic to your e-com site.

For example, say you're selling workout supplements on your e-com site and trying to get ranked for terms like "whey protein powder", "pre-workout", "men's multi-vitamin", and so on.

You still work on getting the e-com site ranked for all of those terms, but now you have the rebuilt aged domain where you can write articles such as:

• Top 5 Whey Protein Powders for 2022
• Best Non-Stimulant Pre-Workout Powders
• Top 3 Men's Multi-Vitamins for Athletes

Now you will potentially own 2 of the spots on page 1 for your money keywords, and you will also be linking from a high-powered authority site to the e-com site, which will be sending strong link juice to your store.

The new info/authority site can also take over as the blog, allowing you to target all of the long-tails on the new site and hopefully get them ranked much easier than they rank on the e-com site due to the strength of the domain. In looking at just the multi-vitamin example alone, while you may only be able to target the main money keywords on an e-com product page, there are a multitudinous amount of search queries you can target on the info site:

• Best Multi-Vitamin for Men Over 40
• Best Multi-Vitamin for Teenagers
• Top Multi-Vitamin for Men Who Exercise
• What to Look For in a Quality Multi-Vitamin
• Benefits of Taking a Multi
• etc.

Then you can do the same for women, kids, elderly, and countless other ideas.

Idk your exact market obviously, but I'm sure you can apply the same thought process to your products/keywords.

Hopefully that helps to give you some ideas. You're crushing it with what sounds to be mostly paid advertising, so opening up the SEO channel could unlock a prodigious amount of untapped traffic/revenue.

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fergster said:

@Henny10 You don't have an affiliate program by chance

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Ahmirof said:

700K a month! A Small E-commerce website!? Bro, you're living my dreams, I'm working over 15 hours and didn't any thousands result yet,
Is it possible to DM me your website address, I just want to see what are you doing and see your pattern,
and in the end I hope you make more than these numbers, Good Luck

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Henny10 said:

Thanks for the message! I’m not able to reveal the URL or specific niche at the moment but I’m happy to answer any general e-commerce questions you might have.

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Ahmirof said:

Thank you for your reply, I understand you,
I'm from a second Most sanctioned countries in the world, So even i decide to steal your niche, i can not do it or compete with you
I just wanted to see what you are experiencing in the real world, To see the history of your website, your website design, Your pattern in SERP and other marketplaces, Actually these kinds of patterns helps me more than stealing your niche, But in the end you have the right to do what you like!

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J1218 said:

So the answer is "no" Mr. Duck, you haven't had any actual experience with aged domains or the majority of what you're attempting to give advice on. Sharing your thoughts is fine, but at least be open to the fact that you might be wrong. It's intellectually dishonest to be this obstinate and intransigent on a topic that you don't have any personal experience with.

@Henny10 It sounds like you have the ads/paid traffic strategy dialed in pretty well on your current site, so I see 2 potential options for you to explore with an aged domain:

1. The first is the obvious and what you already alluded to, which is simply finding a highly relevant domain and doing proper 301 redirects to your current site to see if you can get some SEO benefit. There are plenty of threads here on how to set that up, and you seem like you know what you're doing anyway, so I probably don't need to spend anymore time on this one.

2. This is probably the option I would test out since it doesn't risk your current site at all. You could get an aged domain and build it out into its own informational/authority-style site in the industry, target and get it ranked for all of the same money keywords as you're targeting on your e-com site, then drive the traffic to your e-com site.

For example, say you're selling workout supplements on your e-com site and trying to get ranked for terms like "whey protein powder", "pre-workout", "men's multi-vitamin", and so on.

You still work on getting the e-com site ranked for all of those terms, but now you have the rebuilt aged domain where you can write articles such as:

• Top 5 Whey Protein Powders for 2022
• Best Non-Stimulant Pre-Workout Powders
• Top 3 Men's Multi-Vitamins for Athletes

Now you will potentially own 2 of the spots on page 1 for your money keywords, and you will also be linking from a high-powered authority site to the e-com site, which will be sending strong link juice to your store.

The new info/authority site can also take over as the blog, allowing you to target all of the long-tails on the new site and hopefully get them ranked much easier than they rank on the e-com site due to the strength of the domain. In looking at just the multi-vitamin example alone, while you may only be able to target the main money keywords on an e-com product page, there are a multitudinous amount of search queries you can target on the info site:

• Best Multi-Vitamin for Men Over 40
• Best Multi-Vitamin for Teenagers
• Top Multi-Vitamin for Men Who Exercise
• What to Look For in a Quality Multi-Vitamin
• Benefits of Taking a Multi
• etc.

Then you can do the same for women, kids, elderly, and countless other ideas.

Idk your exact market obviously, but I'm sure you can apply the same thought process to your products/keywords.

Hopefully that helps to give you some ideas. You're crushing it with what sounds to be mostly paid advertising, so opening up the SEO channel could unlock a prodigious amount of untapped traffic/revenue.

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duckquackingmullard said:

EEekk you must be a bird watcher to assume im a Mr..

Is anything over a paragraph considered a rant? If so ill mark your reply as the same also.

Why would an age domain help rank for "long tail keywords" vs any other domain. Nothing. You go picking up long tails because they are generally easier to rank for to start with it's a common strategy for new domains or brands to pick up all the crumbs while chasing the cake, having a "powerfull domain" makes zero difference to this.

The rest of your point 2 stategy i think most ecomemrce sites / brands or whatever do this with a "blog" having an expired domain does jack for that kind of basic content marketing plan.

The test OP wants to do is flawed. Unless its doing like for like what data will be found? Nothing..


Honestly, two planks come to mind. Notice I've not stereotyped anything by suggesting the length.

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Henny10 said:

As I said, happy to answer any questions you have but I won’t be revealing the site at this stage

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Ahmirof said:

That's ok, i understand your decision
You say you will answer my questions, well i can ask questions for weeks after i saw your numbers.
As i said your pattern is the more important thing for me, i mean collapse everything you did and clear the mistakes and wasted times and extract what you did to make the results. So i ask some questions which i think your answers will help a lot of people.

So three things is important: Time, niche, Tasks

How much time you spend from 0 to here? From 0 to first $1000,$1k to $10k , $10k to $100k? And what was the main steps you took for each of these gains? Just tell the main task you did to gain for each step,like link building, ...

How was your process of choosing the niche to become profitable and low competitive? What are the average of your products?i mean is the total from high quantity of orders or high price of product?is it drop shipping or what? Any other suggestions about these

About tasks, where did you list your products except your website? Did you do email, Instant messaging, Social media ,... Marketing? Which platforms you used for ads?

In the end, if you want start from the beginning and want to combine all of your process to a checklist with 10 steps, what are the steps?

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mikaop said:

Make sure to not fall in keyword cannibalization problems - don't target the a keyword of product name with blog post

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Henny10 said:

Happy to summarise some of the main things that moved the needle for me, how about that?

Before I start, the niche selection process was very unique to this project, done entirely offline, and not helpful with regards to online marketing so I won't bother adding anything about that.

Once I had my niche, the most important thing was making sure the site and the branding for the site looked as professional as I could possibly make it. Paying hundreds of dollars (or pounds in my case) for a colour scheme and a clean professional logo might seem like overkill for a bootstrapped startup but I was desperate to look like I had been in the game for a while.

I also didn't have any reviews so I had to rely on first impressions, which is the case for all new websites I suppose.

I studied successful e-commerce websites for a few hours and made a note of all the features they had in common, and added similar features to my site where it was possible to do so.

I hired a Google ads "expert" with more than £1m billed on Upwork and a very high rating. Wasn't working, he didn't seem to care, so I signed up to Skillshare and spent a weekend watching every single training video I could find on Google ads.

Set an ads account up myself and hey presto, things just seemed to work. It's amazing the level of care and attention you will give your own project as opposed to what an outsourced agency or freelancer will, never forget that.

Sales were going reasonably well but I wanted to improve the conversion rate. So I hopped onto Upwork, searched for "copywriting expert" messaged a few freelancers, picked one, gave him about a grand, and a few days later he gave me a file telling me exactly what he thinks the homepage should say, and in what order.

I applied the changes exactly as prescribed and it worked beautifully. CPA dropped by a significant amount and my investment in copy was paid back in less than 1 day.

The next big jump in conversion rate was when I implemented Trustpilot review carousels and star ratings onto the site. It costs quite a lot of money to get all the proper integrations with Trustpilot but personally, I think it's money well spent. Don't underestimate the value of reviews, and don't put crappy self-written ones on your site, I really think customers are getting wise to this.

It can be a little bit nerve-wracking, but my tip for running Trustpilot is that when you get a 1-Star review, (and you will) immediately phone the customer to offer a solution if you can. If phoning isn't possible then email, but I found calling to be the most successful.

I found that I or my main staff member were able to overturn 90% of 1-Star reviews and get the customer to either agree to removing it or updating it, and most of the time they would update it to 5-Star.

Just be understanding, admit when you've cocked up (if you have) and be prepared to take a financial hit on that order. Trust me, offering a discount or a partial refund is a lot cheaper than what 1-Star reviews will cost you. You want to get into the Excellent category and hold onto that for dear life.

I only sold the products directly on our site, and I only used Google ads to generate sales.

If I was to do it all again, and I probably will, I would take similar steps, except I'd get a professional to do the copywriting upfront, and to be brutally honest I'd probably try and game Trustpilot to get a couple of hundred reviews - I appreciate that might seem unethical to some but this is Black Hat World is it not!!!

Also, if you are going to be doing more than 30-40 sales per day, and especially if you aren't offering phone support (we do, many don't) get yourself support desk software. It will make life so much easier, there's even free ones out there so you really have no excuse not to make use of it.

Honestly there are a million things I've probably left out, as I say, I'm happy to answer specific questions - maybe just keep it to one or two questions at a time though please !

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Ahmirof said:

So much appreciated for your respond.
If we want to summeize your explanations, you have experience about your niche in real life, not just some online search.
And for Digital Marketing you think should make our base powerful by Pro Branding, Copywriting and customer support.
And attract people by review on websites like Trust pilot and then paid ads to google ,right?
And how much time you spend on the project? Do you sell locally or international?

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Sabine Schmude said:

Can you share about your total invest (ads on social media ) and Google

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jeanekovac said:

which is the best website to search for expired domains.

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