KEYWORD AS 1ST WORD OF DOMAIN NAME – 1 BIG GOOGLE RANKING FACTOR?

When you choose your domain name, you want to include the overall focus of your business. ‘www.PaulsPlumbingPros.com’. ‘www.EddiesElectricalPros.com’. ‘www.JennysHairSalon.com’. Having your business focus as part of your domain URL helps Google ‘better guess’ what your business is before it dives deeper. It reinforces Google ‘guess’ at what your business can help people with. Remember, Google wants to ‘help’ people searching for help.

However, these examples are NOT optimum for Google. Better examples of domain names would have the ‘business focus’ at the ‘beginning’ of the domain name.

‘www.PlumbingProsByPaul.com’. ‘www.ElectricalProsByEddie.com’. ‘www.HairSalonProsByJenny.com’. As Google scans a domain name from left to right (in left to right writing countries) it looks for ‘words’ being formed by the letters. Seeing ‘Jenny’ as the first word it finds does nothing to help Google put you into an industry category. Seeing ‘Plumbing’ does help Google put you into an industry category more quickly. It’s a small thing, but Google Ranking is all about ‘the small things being added together’.

Having the keyword at the front of the domain name, or even just part of the domain name, is not a heavy weighting today as it was back in 2012, but real life data suggests that it still helps rankings.