December 3rd, 2009 by Avvo Admin

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One way to gain an advantage in the search engines is to have a keyword rich domain name. In other words, if you’re trying to win for “Houston divorce lawyer,” it’s good to have the domain name HoustonDivorceLawyer.com.   The trouble is most domain names that exactly match valuable keywords are already taken…but not all.  So how do you find the hidden gems without checking thousands of domain names by hand? Here’s a trick to do it thoroughly and in minutes.

Step 1: Find out what keywords people are searching for

Before your domain name can contain the right keywords, you have to know what keywords people are searching for.  One of the best ways to do that is by going to Google’s free keyword tool.  There, you can start off by typing in some basic keywords like “Houston divorce.”  The tool will return a list of related keywords and show how much traffic each one gets.

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Step 2: Export and clean up keywords in Excel

Now that you’ve got a big list of keywords, click “Add all” under the relevant sections and export them to an Excel file.

The reason we need Excel  is a lot of the bulk domain checkers choke on keywords with spaces, so you need a way to turn “Houston divorce lawyer” into “Houstondivorcelawyer” (and there are some other nifty Excel tricks you can do, discussed below).  Removing spaces only takes a second with this simple Excel formula: =SUBSTITUTE(A103,” “,”") .  A103 is the cell containing the word with the spaces.

Step 3: Paste your list into a bulk domain checker

Now that you have a list of pruned, spaceless domains, simply copy/paste them all into a bulk domain checker like this one, where you can easily tell which domains are available in .com, .net and .org.

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Tips and tricks

Having your keywords in Excel allows you do to all sorts of tricks.  For example, let’s say you’re open to having dashes in your domain name, like “divorce-lawyer.com”.  A slight change in the Excel formula to remove spaces will do that:  =SUBSTITUTE(A103,” “,”-”).

Or let’s say you have a national practice and you wanted to search for every major city in America plus “mesothelioma lawyer.”  To do that, just copy/paste this list of American cities into Excel.  Once you’ve got a that list in place, use the concatenate function,  =CONCATENATE(A1,”mesothelioma lawyer”), to add the cities to “mesothelioma lawyer,” and then use the function from above to remove spaces or add dashes:

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Happy domaining!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 3:59 pm by Avvo Admin and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.