Sometimes, you’ll want to find a nice geo-specific domain for either an SEM campaign, a niche microsite, or simply establishing your first website with ties to your surrounding areas.
When we say “geo-specific” we’re talking about a geo-modifier with likely what your business does:

  • bocaratonpoolcompany.com
  • phoenixtaxaccountant.com
  • hairsalonchicago.com

We’ve seen from experience that often times these types of domains have their benefits if you establish your brand once people get to the website. Now if you’re doing a campaign that has no physical boundaries such as an e-commerce website but you still want to take advantage of geo-modifiers, there is one technique that I personally appreciate that can cut out some time and yield some impressive results.

Let’s say you are a medical staffing agency and you want to launch a microsite strategy for the whole country, finding domains that will not only be available but possibly have existed in the past (and thus have a higher probability of authority for Google and gives it a potential boost SEO-wise, easily saving you a couple months’ worth of optimization). You want to do the top 100 cities in the United States, and we’ll append “medicaljobs” and “.com” to each.

First, we’ll be working a bit in Excel, so let’s get an Excel with the top cities in the US here.

excel1

Once you open the excel, we’re going to have to work with the cities to make them usable to concatenate together to string together URLs. Let’s delete columns B and C, then select the data and remove all spaces and “-“‘s. Once your cities are done in column A, go to column B and type in “medicaljobs.com” or append whatever business or industry you want to try. Now in column C, type in =CONCATENATE(A1,B1) and drag it all the way down to the end. Nice! You’ve just constructed 100 potential URLs, and if you want to change the “medicaljobs.com” to maybe “physicaltherapy.com” you can with ease to update across the board.

excel2

Now we will do a bulk domain search:

excel3

So now we know we have plenty of domains available across the country. But now we’re interested in which ones are actually “aged”, which is a pretty substantial part of playing the SEO game.

We’re start using a bulk URL opener and use our trusted Majestic SEO tool (which is free and works with Chrome) – let’s open no more than 20 at a time.

excel4

Some movement in the Citation Flow and Trust Flow is definitely indicative of previous activity. Now in the last step, we’ll use the Wayback Machine to really see how old it is and if it was important enough to get crawled every so often.

excel5

First getting crawled in 2009 would give it a fairly effective age of 6 years – not too bad. Somewhat of a good foundation for building a site upon.

For more tips on domain building, website development, or SEM campaigns, talk with an expert from Market My Market. We are a digital marketing agency that has experience providing companies of all industries with creative online solutions. Let us optimize your business’ digital presence. Contact our digital marketing experts at (800) 997-7336 to receive a free marketing consultation.