Written by Fernando Maciá
Exact Match Domains, or EMDs, are domain names that exactly match a website’s target keywords. For example:
- agenciaseoalicante.com
- consultorseoalicante.info
- agenciamarketingalicante.es
- Long etcetera.
This is a technique widely used by webmasters and SEO consultants in the first decade of the 2000s. to give a boost to the rankings of a portal in search engines, because Google considered it as a very important factor when calculating the relevance of a website. Realizing its effect on rankings, many webmasters joined the practice of buying domains that exactly matched the search terms they wanted to rank for. If the extension .com with the coveted domain name was already registered, they did not hesitate to choose other less common extensions, such as .info, .net, o .eu in order to register a domain name containing your business’ target keywords, you can use hyphens to separate words, or any other similar method.
Today it is considered an almost obsolete SEO practice. The massive and uncontrolled use of this type of domains led to the creation of numerous websites that were poor in quality and content, but nevertheless achieved very good positions in the SERP because they contained highly searched terms in their domain names.
As always, search engines had to take action against the spread of this habit, and as early as 2012, Matt Cutts, former head of Google’s anti-spam department, announced on his Twitter account that an update to the search engine’s algorithm was going to reduce the presence of low-quality Exact Match Domains in the results pages. As a result, the influence of EMDs was drastically reduced, losing practically all of their SEO effectiveness.
EMDs today
Even though it has lost most of its relevance, using Exact Match Domains still has some positioning advantages always within a very specific context and relying on other factors, such as that the website is concerned about generating quality content, offers a good user experience, and other positive aspects taken into account by Google over whether or not a domain contains keywords on their behalf.
But there are also important disadvantages, especially if we want to be recognized with our brand name. Betting all our positioning in Google with an Exact Match Domain is not the best idea, since it will detract from our credibility with our potential customers, as there is no direct association between the brand itself and the domain name. So, if we want to enhance branding and be memorable, so that when users see our name they access our website because they recognize us as experts in our field, it is better to avoid EMDs.
Finally, we are going to see the three most basic assumptions that can occur according to the needs of the type of business that we manage, and the type of domain that we should get based on its characteristics:
- If, for example, we offer a plumbing service in Alicante, and we don’t care how we are known, as long as our potential customers find us easily and hire us in case of a problem, the domain plumberenalicante.es can serve us perfectly.
- Yes, on the contrary, we have a veterinary clinic in the same city and we want people to know us and remember us for our knowledge and skills. in the treatment of animals, we will be interested in opting for a Partial Match Domain (domain that partially matches the keyword positioning objective, halfway between an EMD and a brand domain), for example: clinica-veterinaria-mascotafeliz.es.
- And if we want to focus 100% on enhancing our brand, and, for example, we have an e-commerce, our domain should only contain the name we have chosen to call ourselves, as do zara.com, asos.com or amazon.com, among other large retail companies.
