What's in a name: Domain strategies that work for local media and marketers

Local media site publishers are often looking for ways to redeploy their brand online, or launch new verticals. With the domain market over-mined by professional speculators, how should local media companies create their own domain name strategies? Here are some answers from domain name experts at the 2010 GeoDomain Expo.

1. Look for opportunities to buy or partner with pure city.com sites
“The .com of the city name is the strongest brand in any market. It's intuitive; it SEO’s better than any other term. It is the name of the city on the internet,” says Dan Pulcrano, CEO of Boulevards, Inc. which owns 22 of the largest city.com names in the country. The problem is that there is only one city.com name…and dozens of media companies per market competing online.

Buying or partnering with the geodomain hasn’t seemed to take hold, in part because domainers are "patient money" and haven't been willing to sell for what their sites are currently worth based on typical revenue metrics.

As the values have leveled off, however, every year more of these passive city.com domain begin to develop their sites, which have an immediate advantage in natural (search) traffic and of course, the brand. So  purchasing the premium .com name is also a defensive strategy. The higher the travel component of a market, the more valuable the name, since  it is much more difficult to acquire search traffic from outside the local area for a created brand than  for the city.com name.

Still, so far very few dominant local online media own their city.com names, with notable exceptions that include Boston.com, owned by the Boston Globe; Cincinatti.com owned by KnightRidder; Richmond.com purchased by MediaGeneral for an undisclosed (but reasonably guessed seven figure) amount, and on a smaller scale Lawrence.com in Kansas (note: that Hotels.com purchased Orlando.com speaks volumes). There are also instances of newspapers partnering with .com sites, such as saratoga.com in New York. 

If there are opportunities to buy a city.com name, it’s worth looking at. Moniker.com’s next auction list this year included a tiny number of pure city.com names including sausolito.com, a small very wealthy city on the coast of central California, with a reserve price of $50,000 to $100,000. Get to know the city.com owners in your market, and check dnjournal.com for lists of transactions that usually  include a few city.com names and moniker.com for upcoming auctions.

2. Register expanded monikers...sometimes
Without owning “The Name” there can be more wrong than right domain name strategies. Some common variations include registering the city name with the word “visit” or “signon” or “goto” or some other moniker in front of it. But these are not perfect naming devices.

For example when the Palm Springs daily newspaper started promoting VisitPalmsSprings.com, “they branded their competitor,” says Pulcrano.

“It's basically telling them to “Visit PalmSprings.com. Every time they take out a billboard, David Castello (owner of Palmsprings.com) gets phone calls.” Similarily, when the L.A. Convention and Visitors Bureau bought a billboard for “VisitLosAngeles.com, traffic to LosAngeles.com (owned by Pulcrano) spiked.

“The word ’Visit’ is red and ‘LosAngeles .com’ is in black, which is even more helpful,” he said.

But according to Ron Jackson, Publisher of dnjournal.com, the leading news site for the domain industry, adding generic monikers like “visit” to the city name can still be a viable strategy.

“You don’t have too many options.”

Jackson suggests the following: Look for alternate names are short, make sense and are memorable. SignonSanDiego.com, for example, “is not bad because it’s memorable.”

But long and leaky. “You have come to grips that you are going to leak traffic to someone who has a key name like San Diego. It’s really a question of how much.”

Another example is AZCentral, a newspaper site that acquired massive traffic after years of promotion. "They didn't start out with anything extraordinarily valuable, and  the site does not get much natural traffic," says Chris Kennedy of GoDaddy. But because it is owned and promoted by a newspaper it is now well known locally. Still most of the traffic is local; "it does not work well as a travel portal." 

3. Always buy the .com. Never register alternate endings like .net. 

“If the LA CVB had bought LosAngles.net it would be even worse. Buying anything but the .com name just driving tons of traffic to whomever owns the .com, ” he said. "Hyphenated names have the same problem." 

One defensive strategy Jackson suggested is to employ .info and info.com to protect generic key word brands. For example, if you register hotels.info and hotelsinfo.com people, who type in hotelsinfo and directly hotelsinfo.com will still get to the right site.

For pureplays without a traditional legacy media bullhorn, or for travel-oriented markets, it may be cost effective to pay the higher price for a premium name. 

4. Use poetic devices

If you are scanning for generic search words, Jackson says to look for names that are short, and use rhymes or alliteration (repitition of consonants);  names that are memorable, include key generic words, help differentiate the brand and end in .com. Legacy media have the ability to create new brands without spending a fortune on marketing, so using tricks that aid memory can create brands more quickly.

A new network of city sites, Missouri.me, breaks  all the rules (not a .com, not a newspaper site) but  told the audience at the Expo that it is promoting the network through numerous alliances with Chambers of Commerce, media companies and business associaitons.  In addition to the alliteration, Missouri.me plays on the "Show Me" state slogan, and therefore "does not require an uphill battle for people to remember it."  Cities in the network are in the format of stlouis.missouri.me.

Another example  that does not use generic search terms  MadMariner, the name of a boating site, registered because boating.com was not an affordable option. It stuck. Alliteration and rhyming originated in medieval literature as a memory aid before printing was widely used; plus the MadMariner.com logo includes a cartoon of a luny (drunken?) looking sailor as a visual memory aid. We know this guy. Given a choice however, go with the search word. 

5. Create separate URL brands when it makes sense
Broadcast sites have as great or greater a challenge than print sites in creating new online brands, since station call letters general have little meaning. Komo.com for example is a Seattle TV site, but if you don’t watch a lot of television, well, it could be anywhere.

So far Fisher Communications, who owns Komo, has stuck to the tv brand for their main interactive site which now also hosts a large community of hyper-local neighborhood sites in an awkwardly branded network. Since Komo is the singular bullhorn - driving direct traffic to komo.com - this strategy works for them. 

When a group of Long Island radio stations started a coupon site, they already had multiple brands. So they registered YourLI.com.  Asked to evaluate this strategy, Jackson gave this breakdown:

“Yourli.com is not terrible. It’s short. If you are going to do a lot of marketing, one thing to do is give the name the radio test: Is it going to come across clearly when you hear the words. ‘Your’ might be difficult to hear or understand the difference between ‘your’, ‘you’re’ and ‘url’. MyLI.com is much better than YourLI because it has fewer letters and it rhymes.”

However, he added all of the three and four letter combination names have been systematically mined by speculators, so you have to buy them. He also said that LIDeals or LICoupons would be even better, because its more specific to the site's function.”

6. Aggregate the long tail domains in your market
One strategy that all local media should employ  is to register or buy numerous small verticals that contain the geoname and one other search term, such as losgatoscars.com or losgatoslawncare.com, especially in hyperlocal communities. Buying up related keyword strings, called “long tail terms” and pointing them to pages on the main site has had proven results in search rankings. Pulcrano, like most of domainers at the expo owns hundreds of longtail terms in his market area (including some of the dreaded hyphenated names as infill, which he does not promote). This is a key strategy that many media sites overlook.

In fact, deeper into domainland, Jackson says you will find DarkBlueSea, an Australian company that specializes in aggregating long tail domains. The site is called, Fabulous.com, run by CEO Dan Warner, a huge evangelist for those long tail terms that people overlook. There are still untapped areas out there. Another resource for purchasing catchy terms, is catchy.com.

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.

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