Successfully Developing Geo Domains
Jan 26th, 2009 by Richard
There has been a lot of discussion about geo domains lately from Andrew, Elliot and Rick, to name a few.
In the summer of 2008, we started development on a city.com geo domain. The domain was active with about 150 pages of content and 300 visitors per day. In five months, we have expanded the domain to about 2500 pages of content and 1000 visitors per day.
Here’s a few tips for successful geo domain development:
1. Develop the domain name, don’t park it! You’ll get 2-3 times as much traffic to a developed city.com and that means more money in your pocket.
2. Create relevant content and give people what they are searching for. Use some of the tools to do research and find at least 100 long tail phrases of what people are searching for. Then, build content for those phrases.
3. Create ’stickiness’ on your geo domain site. Use fresh content in the form of news headlines, blog posts, weather etc. Depending your market, classifieds might be popular for your visitors. Consider using a photo gallery and give your visitors the opportunity to share their photos on your city.com site.
4. Offer cool features on your geo domain that can’t be found on the local newspaper or the ‘other guys’ bestcityguide.info site. A relevant search feature with accurate results, geo targeted maps included in your content and local news bulletins are good examples of features the competition normally fail to execute.
5. Reach out to local business groups and bloggers in your geo domain’s area. Join the local chamber of commerce to network with local businesses, talk to the local business associations and offer to promote their events on your site, search google for bloggers who write about your city and point them to your relevant content and cool features so they can link to it in their next blog post.
Are you developing your city.com domains?
[Stay tuned, in the coming weeks, I will post a multi-part series of the step-by-step development of a city.com and spill the beans on how we tripled the daily visitors and rank #1 in google for more than 10,000 search terms.]
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Thanks! I am so hungry for geo information. What is the city site that you put up?
I am developing a small town (20,000 inhabitants) GEO that is not a tourist destination. My strategy is to provide some local new, weather and images, along with free classifieds. I will monetize with adsense, affiliates, and a few directory listings.
Are there any good examples of this non-tourist type site? I think a different, less intensive, approach is required from that you would see with a big city GEO like the one you are developing.
What sites do you recommend I take a look at in these planning stages? Thanks for any suggestions!
@PhilGus
I have 12 more articles coming about domain development, in which I plan to answer all your questions and share our experiences. I hope you will enjoy them!
- Richard
Some good ideas to differentiate yourself from the competition. Excited to read your mulit-part series, I’m sure we will use some ideas!
Richard…good stuff, thanks for the article series. I have a few geos also. I’ll add to the mix that if you can buy a geo near where you live you have a much greater chance of getting the trust of local businesses and making money.
Tim,
That is absolutely true. I feel that to make a city.com truly successful, you must have someone living or regularly visiting the city to build the brand and sell to local advertisers.