Bill Hartzer will be speaking on SEO at SearchFest 2016, which is being held March 10th, 2016 at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I am a Senior SEO Strategist at Globe Runner, based in Dallas. I typically perform highly complex technical SEO audits of client sites, and provide overall strategy. I head the research arm of Globe Runner, by doing SEO research and testing. Lately, we have been working on testing the viability and performance of the new gTLD domain names: does having a keyword in the ending help? We’ve tested it on Google AdWords, and am looking at the SEO performance of keyword-rich domains, with the keywords in the ending. This past Fall, I launched a new service called Verified Domains, the first-ever background check service for domain names. If we verify the domain, then we offer up to a $50,000 guarantee that the domain name is clean and doesn’t have any historical problems.
2) What lessons have you learned from the early chaotic days of the web that are still relevant today?
Having creating sites and optimizing sites since 1996, I’ve learned over the years that content drives traffic to sites. Whether it’s a photo, graphic, or written content, the overall formula for driving traffic hasn’t changed since the mid 1990s: create the content on your site and then promote it. I remember using message boards to drive traffic, that was the “social media” back then. Now, the search engines have finally caught up and they’re monitoring social and watching traffic. Personally, I think it’s gotten a lot easier to promote content than it has been in the past. Now, you can just post something on Facebook or Twitter (even a link to a site) and you can see traffic fairly quickly. In the past, it took a lot longer to start seeing massive amounts of traffic.
3) What are the top reasons a company should consider branding with a newer TLD?
A good domain name is still extremely important, whether it’s a new gTLD domain name or a .COM domain. In fact, the domain really doesn’t matter. Or does it? Google has publicly stated that every domain has an equal chance of ranking. Technically it may, but if you pair content about a certain keyword and you also have that keyword in the domain name, people will be more apt to link to it with your preferred anchor text. If it’s www.keyword1keyword.com or www.keyword1.keyword2, I think people will link to you using “keyword1 keyword2”. If it’s companyname.com they’ll link to you with “company name” as the anchor text.
I’ve proven with our Globe Runner research and testing that your quality score will be higher if you use a keyword1.keyword2 domain rather than keyword1keyword2.com. So if you’re doing PPC, then why not use a new gTLD domain?
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.