Owen comments on the "SEO Guru Provost Nails It" post:
""Zillow- nope that’s not it .. It’s that they do not use "house values" as keyword copy.. That they don’t match the other words ..That they use cutesy invented words like zestimate rather then plain english that explains what they do. I could fix this in a NY Minute- do it every day- took a long time to learn. That said, having a press release about knowing the value of your home and staying informed which is not branded zillow but goes to a generic url can get to the top as well and Zillow is irrelevant until they get to the page. Too many companies waste the limited word count that compels a click by talking about themselves and their buzz words rather than make an offer that a customer cares about.
Every Google listing should be a like a classified ad. They need to be rigged that way. It takes seo copy skill which is very different from all the metatags, text anchors and other techy things seo experts think matters more. I do this with PDF docs on a server that has no facing content. Has nothing to do with HTML.""
So I got to thinking about Google, Domains, Traffic, Zillow and companies like theirs. Companies which build wonderful platforms, which exert great collective energy to create a mousetrap, a service, a website.. Zillow has "the buzz" and "press zest" because the site was conjured up by Rich Barton, the former Microsoft executive who created Expedia.. That site became a big hit. I think Rich and his team will do it again with Zillow, but had they acquired a large bucket of generic real estate domain names for $50 or 100 million, they would have placed their company in a much stronger lifetime position. Why?.. because they would have made it harder for others to bid for traffic at Google, Yahoo and MSN. Why is that? It has to do with the traffic cycle and eco system.
There are only so many generic intent domain names with type-in traffic. Names like SarasotaRealEstate.com, HouseHunting.com or HomeAppraisal.com. Anyone can own these names and use them as they see fit. These names deliver high quality type-in-traffic which comes for the descriptive nature of the words which make up the name. Buy one of these names and you get 20 or 30 visits a day. Work to acquire 10,000 generic names like this and you sit on a gusher of 6million to 9million targeted unique visits a month!
In today’s traffic ecosystem the majority of generic keyword style domain names are marshaled by hundreds of middlemen, parking companies, redistributors, subsyndicators etc.. and all this fancy plumbing leads domain name traffic back to the two dominant keyword marketplaces at Yahoo and Google where that traffic is sold to sites like Zillow on a per-click basis. Had Zillow bought "the cow" in the form of thousands of generic domain names, they upset that eco-system by removing supply from the marketplaces. Point SarasotaRealEstate.com to Zillow and that traffic is no longer available for Trulia to bid on at Yahoo.. You could argue that every time a high quality domain name gets sold and developed or redirected to another existing site that the price for the remaining traffic quietly goes up.
That is one of the reasons I babble about buying a generic defensible type in traffic domain name to compliment your brand. It reduces your lifetime traffic acquisition and marketing costs.
It isn’t practical for every start-up to spend $50mm buying buckets of high quality domain names of course.. But if you were sure you had a hit on your hands and if you had the grand-master like foresight to think eight steps ahead of your peers, it would help seal your success and make it harder for others to follow in your wake if you did.
The auction will take place at this years’s TRAFFIC conference in Ft. Lauderdale Friday, October 12th 2007
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