Ranking An Offline Client - Strategy Question?

Hi guys,

I'm working with an offline client - web design and SEO. Their current site is poorly designed and very poorly optimised. No where to be found on Google. As part of my strategy I purchased an EMD (.com) that was available for the main keyword they wish to rank for in their city.

My question is - what's the best way to use this? This keyword gets 590 exact searches per month (1600 broad) which is quite high for the service and city so it's definitely a real asset. What's the best way to utilise this EMD, bearing in mind they want to keep the main site as the companyname.com. Would you?

- Build a mini-site around that keyword that links to company site on any click?
- Create a single page website that links to company website on any click?
- Use some sort of 301 re-direct or refresh that goes to the company site after x seconds or automatically redirects to company site when clicked in organic rankings?
- Other?

Not used this strategy before so input would be appreciated. Thanks.

Any thoughts?

On the EMD I would throw up a simple one-page site with a well written review of the service. Add a picture or video to make it look prettier and then link to the company site. Then do your normal SEO stuff and link to both, this way you're passing extra link juice to the primary domain plus adding in reputation management for free. That's how I'd do it.

The search volume is so low that the EMD doesn't even matter really, let them keep companyname.com and work on that while SEO'ing the companyname.com with the Keywords. It isnt that hard to rank a site with such a low search volume, also, there probably isnt that much competition for it if the search volume is so low.

Keep the EMD for yourself and rank it and then offer advertising space on it and reach out to all the people in that city that are doing this thing and ask if they want to advertise on your highly ranked website.

You can make a a few hundred dollars per advertisement on your EMD page while making money off the companyname.com client.

Just my two cents.

Thanks for the ideas guys. I'll proceed with the one page site and link to both for added benefit. Had considered selling advertising space but guess the client would be pretty annoyed if they discovered it!

Another thing you can do is build a "wrap around site" and encompass their existing site. You can title it "this great domain name brought to you by|a division of | part of the XXX family. Here we highlight our blahblahblah service...or whatever drivel you want to use.

Rank this site on its own and link to to the mother site for contacts and services.