Hyphen In Domain / Domain name advice ?

[pacman]

Hello all,

I've been asked to build and rank a driveway cleaning website in Manchester, England now the issue I have they also carry out garden maintenance work and would like their domain as diamonddgm.co.uk the dgm at the end being short for driveway and garden maintenance.

Should I use the name above or diamond-dgm.co.uk or perhaps diamond-driveway-cleaning-manchester ( and leave the garden bit out at the end )

I'm not 100% on how hyphens actually work. Any advise would be much appreciated as I see lots of different views on this.

Many Thanks Paco

 

[djbaxter]

Hello all,

I've been asked to build and rank a driveway cleaning website in Manchester, England now the issue I have they also carry out garden maintenance work and would like their domain as diamonddgm.co.uk the dgm at the end being short for driveway and garden maintenance.

Should I use the name above or diamond-dgm.co.uk or perhaps diamond-driveway-cleaning-manchester ( and leave the garden bit out at the end )

I'm not 100% on how hyphens actually work. Any advise would be much appreciated as I see lots of different views on this.

The SEO value of exact match domains has decreased in recent years, so at this point the primary reason for using hyphens in a domain name would probably be for readability and reproducibility, i.e., trying to maximize the likelihood that someone typing in the domain manually will spell it correctly.

In terms of SEO, there is no advantage of diamond-dgm.co.uk over diamonddgm.co.uk. In terms of reproducibility, possibly there's an advantage for diamond-dgm.co.uk but I would want to own both domains if you use that for those people who forget the hyphen (301 redirect the version you don't want to the version you do want).

Using diamond-driveway-cleaning-manchester.co.uk really doesn't give you any advantage, in my opinion. It's longer, more likely to result in typos if manually entered, it looks spammy, and any SEO advantage you might obtain would be minor at best.

Given that the client prefers diamonddgm.co.uk, I would go with that.

 

[pacman]

Hi, thanks for your reply it really helped me it was a similar sounding domain which the client wanted as a non hyphen and looks like it's not that much of a big deal.

It's my first day on this forum and hope to learn lots, and contribute as and when I can.

Thanks again Pacman

 

[James Watt]

Welcome to the forum Pacman! Just for an extra vote of confidence, I agree. diamonddgm.co.uk sounds like the right pick.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Don't choose a domain based on SEO. The effect is negligible. Also, if they're really planning to grow their domain name will be a great branding tool and will be used in all types of marketing: email, content marketing, radio, TV, print ads, etc. You want to think of the domain in terms of branding for all marketing, not just for one piece of marketing (SEO).

Choose based on branding strategy and you will be fine!