My friend Stuart at Pimpmypagerank wrote an interesting piece about plurals a few days ago.
Pretty simple really, just drop an instance or two of the plural for your main keyword, and double your chances of picking up some extra search traffic…. (read his whole article here)
In addition to the keyword pluralization issue you should always consider the possessive form of names … as well as the country code issues we talked about recently.
One of my fav channels on cable TV here is the Australian Broadcast Network. They carry some of the shows I miss from US PBS and some excellent "home grown" programming. One of their frequent advertisers is a real estate venture near Melbourne called Martha Cove. I’ve also seen this outfit advertising on the Discovery Channel, Asia … in other words it is not a "nickel-dime" operation. their messages always include the fact that their properties are approved for foreign owners/investors and, since much of their expensive TV ads are placed outside Australia it is clear they are marketing to the world and not just folks who live near Safety beach, Victoria, Australia, where their property is located.
Each of their expensive commercials proudly lists their web site … a decently done site, I might add, at www.marthacove.com.au … so what’s wrong with the picture?
In my book two important things. people in other countries are liable to forget or neglect to include the country code of .au at the end of the URL. The vast majority of people online, even those from countries which routinely use a country code, do not sit by the TV with a pen and paper in hand. They are going to we going to note that the web site intelligently is the same as the property name and when they are ready go to their computer and type in www.marthacove.com . when they do, they will get a one page parking site loaded with every form of real estate advertising under the sun … but they won’t get to the site of the property they wanted to know more about buying. Do you think the folks managing martha Cove would have been smart to spend a grand total of about $9 more dollars and register the .com extension as well as the .com.au URL? Seems like they made a very foolish economy decision here.
Now, to finish up on this thought, recall that the name of the property is Martha Cove … as is it were named after a girl called Martha. When we see names like this, as English speakers, we almost all, unconsciously add the possessive form of the name in out mind. No matter what out eyes see, our mind thinks of the place name as "Martha’s Cove".
For the small sum of $5.99 at Name.Com, a little more or a little less at other domain registrars, this big-buck marketing effort could have captured the substantial trade in folks who will unconsciously type www.marthascove.com instead of www.marthacove.com . Certainly seems that it would have been a wise investment to me … they wouldn’t even need a web site at the secondary address, most registrars will forward a domain name to another domain name for free.
Well they chose not to register www.marthascove.com, so I did. Time will tell if I can earn $5.99 from this domain, but one thing for sure, I can safely say they will lose a lot more than $6 if someone with money in their pocket clicks on my URL rather than theirs while thinking of buying 6 or 7 figure investment properties.
Moral? When setting up a marketing site, cover the intelligent bases … don’t be too cheap to spend $6 or $8 of misspellings, plurals, possessives and, above all, if you are trying to attract buyers? USE THE .COM!
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