Appraisal For: xxxxx.info
I appraise domains based on the following factors
- Domain TLD Competition
- Domain Name Traffic Potential
- Domain Name Traffic Competition W/Google
- Domain PR (Page Rank) W/Google
- Domain Brandability
- Domain Past and Similar Sales History
I then categorize it's value into '3' sections
- Reseller Value
- End User Value
- Selling Time Frame (Cost to Sell)
Domain TLD Competition
Domain TLD Competition value stems from the fact that certain TLD's are worth more because of the characteristics they have.
Those characteristics being
- Does the TLD make your domain easier to remember or make it unique (Example: del.icio.us)
- Is your TLD Saturated in the market?
Note: More saturation means more competition for domains since most good keywords have been taken = worth more!
Example: Type on google site:.com, site:.net, site:etc...
(Example: .com - 25,350,000,000 for site:.com
(Example: .net - 8,740,000,000 for site:.net
(Example: .org - * 6,540,000,000 for site:.org
(Example: .info - 1,140,000,000 for site:.info
(Example: .us - 659,000,000 for site:.us
(Example: .cc - 480,000,000 for site:.cc
(Example: .tv - 417,000,000 for site:.tv
(Example: .biz - 374,000,000 for site:.biz
In general the above are the most commonly used TLD's. The TLD .info ranks about '4th' in terms of being the most used TLD. It is much harder to find good keywords now for .com since so many sites exist. Much like real estate when the market gets crowded it drives the price up. The .Info is probably a good place to invest in valuable keywords for the future since it's getting more crowded and it's still relatively inexpensive.
- Cost to renew the TLD
Example: I know for a fact that .cc domains cost $19.99/yr to renew at most places, and some domain extensions cost $50-100/yr. The TLD .info is the most inexpensive of all the TLD's to renew at $2-3/yr at most registrars, sometimes even $1/yr or given away free with some deals.
- Its rank in the TLD ladder
Example: .com is worth the most followed by .net, .org & .info, if you owned some keyword in the .net and someone else owned the same keyword but in .info and .us then you have 'two' potential buyers that may want to climb the TLD ladder and there is definitely value there, especially to a reseller.
How do I know know what rank a TLD belongs to? The best way is to look at what 3-letter combinations sell for in different extensions against each other on average. Fortunately there is such a site for doing this.
3Character.com - 3 Character Domain Name Price Guide
The site above shows the current price that LLL domains are selling for on the market. Where LLL represents a keyword composed of any letters (A-Z) 3 times in a row. For example zqr, pdj, zzz, abc, etc, what not. The point is since the 3 letters can stand for anything the price won't be biased like comparing other domain names might be. For example comparing dogs.com to magicmarshmellows.net wouldn't make a proper comparison since the value is obviously in the keyword and it's hard to tell what percentage the domain extension is having if any. You will also notice that the price for LLL domains closely follows the pattern I talked about before concerning domain saturation. The order is almost exactly the same. The reason .org sells for substantially less even though it's not that far off in saturation has to do with the fact that it's limited to organizational use and not really commercial. This is the same reason .biz sells for slightly more then .us despite .us having more saturation. This may change in the future however since .biz has not been doing well lately in my opinion.
In general the easier your domain is to remember, the more used and credible the TLD is considered in the market , the lower the renewal cost and the higher you rank in the TLD ladder will decide your ultimate value in this area.
After checking via: domainsite.com I discovered...
EDIT: I did a search on elaw here by mistake, but xxxxx turned out to be about the same.
xxxx.com: Taken
xxxx.net: Taken
xxxx.us: Taken
xxxx.org: Taken
xxxx.tv: Taken
xxxx.info: Taken
xxxx.biz: Taken
xxxx.mobi: Taken
xxxx.ws: Taken
xxxx.in: Taken
xxxx.bz: Taken
xxxx.cc: Taken
xxxx.us.com: Available
xxxx.eu.com: Available
xxxx.eu: ?
xxxx.name: The registry for this TLD is down. Please try again later.-3
xxxx.ag: Taken
xxxx.sc: Taken
xxxx.la: Taken
xxxx.hn: Taken
xxxx.cn: Taken
xxxx.am: Available
xxxx.fm: Taken
As you can see there is a lot of interest in the domain name if people are willing to pay the huge renewal fees on this for the keywords below (assuming you aren't the one that bought any of those).
You can therefor assume that for a nice generic TLD like yours (.info) is one that someone wishing to climb the ladder would easily be willing to pay more for so they save money on renewals and gain more credibility with there keyword.
To try and put a value on this, one can take the renewal fees of the domain names below you and tally them up and take the average. You know that if someone is paying $19.99 on a .cc domain below you that chances are they wouldn't mind paying $20~ to get the better domain at a minimum since they are already paying that. On top of this the more people you have competing below you the more likely one of them is to raise the other in an auction setting and if you are really lucky an end user instead of just a reseller may be playing in the auction.
Resellers would be more likely to buy the domain at a higher price if they feel the average of the renewal prices of the same name registered in a TLD below the ladder are in the favor if they want to turn around and sell it again for little loss. Add those prices for every domain below and you start to get an interesting reseller price strategy going. For every person below you in the TLD ladder, you can add about 2%, which is usually the bid increments for an auction to whatever the total price turned out to be. I didn't completely just make up this figure it's based on two interesting articles I read about the nature of humans when bidding.
Auction theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia &
English auction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's quite complex some of the formulas and discussion but to make it short, the more people bidding the higher your chances of a more valued sale. My assumption is that the people below you in the TLD ladder will be interested bidders. To make it easy while this isn't exactly as accurate as the auction theory document describes, I chose to simulate this bidding phenomena by adding a small +2% to the total price we come up with as the average at the end for every domain below in the TLD ladder.
xxxx.us -> $8.88
xxxx.tv -> $29.99
xxxx.cc -> $19.99
xxxx.biz ->*$12.99
xxxx.mobi -> $8.88
xxxx.ws -> $35.00
xxxx.in -> $25+
xxxx.bz -> $50+
xxxx.ag -> $50+
xxxx.sc -> $50+
xxxx.la -> $30+
xxxx.hn -> $50+
xxxx.cn ->$39.99
xxxx.fm -> $50+
Average Value -> $32.50
Adjust Percentage: %26~
Possible Reseller Value: ->
$40.95
End User Potential: -> 13+ known possible bidders
End User Value: -> Can't be determined or estimated from this data.
The above value is only for this one valuation factor. There is more value factors to consider that can add to this score or take away.
Domain Name Traffic Potential
Your domain name is important to a lot of users because of it's power to manipulate the search engines because of just it's name. In particular Google since it owns 85% of the marketshare and I will be basing my data around this search engine. If your name without the TLD at the end uses a popular keyword this can greatly add to it's value. Unfortunately or Fortunately depending on how you look at it, google is known to more likely show .com, .org, .net and .us domains first if there is a tie. To really understand your domains traffic potential an explanation of how the domain effects the search engine is in order.
Search Engine Ranking Factors | SEOmoz
The site above is a great resource that goes into the debate of what importance different factors have on the ranking of sites.
For a complete list of factors, look at the link below.
Search Engine Ranking Factors | SEOmoz
Interesting enough in the article I found that keyword use in the root domain name added to about 60% of the importance in assisting a user to get to the top of the search engines. This is an extremely important point as when trying to target valuable keywords every edge you can get is important. You probably noticed that when typing in most keywords the sites that have the keyword as the domain name are most likely to show up.
In the case of a sub-domain having the keyword or having part of the keyword in the domain name it only added 42% importance. So trying to cheat that way doesn't work as well.
Also considered low in importance is the length of the domain registration at 37%. So you can buy domain names with long keywords and it's not a problem to much.
Another interesting note is the domain registration history. I always hear a lot of people talking about the huge difference this makes in search engine optimization. According to my source it considerers it of low importance at 36%. This means it doesn't really hurt to go out and buy a domain name based on the keyword even though you have only owned it for a little bit.
Another interesting note is that the TLD makes a huge difference on the GEO-Targeting Factors, 69% in fact. That is to say, if you live in france and you have a .fr domain, then your site is more likely to show up first.
So what does all this data have to do with your domain names traffic potential. I'm trying to argue that your domain name and extention make a big difference as a factor in how your domain is ranked. For your convenience I've listed the top factors in order and what is important I've bolded for you. All my data is based from my link source at seomoz.org
Ranking is ordered based on...
73% - Keyword-Focused Anchor Text From External Links
71% - External Link Popularity (Quantity/Quality of External Links)
69% - (Geo-Targeting Factor) -> Country Code TLD of the Root Domain (e.g .co.uk, .de, .fr, .com.au, etc)
67% - Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)
66% - Keyword Use Anywhere in Title Tag
66% - Trustworthiness of the domain based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)
65% - Page-Specific TrustRank (has the individual page earned links from trusted sources
65% - Existence of Substantive, Unique Content on the Page
64% - Global Link Popularity of the Domain Based on an Iterative Link Algorithm (e.g PageRank on the domain graph)
63% - Iterative Algorithm-Based Global Link Popularity (PageRank)
63% - Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
60% - Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com)
58% - Topic-Specificity/Focus of External Link Sources (whether external links to this page come from topically relevant pages/sites)
55% - Keyword-Focused Anchor Text from Internal Links
The above shows that your TLD and the use of the keyword in the domain name account as the 3rd and 12th rule in determining the ranking to a site and this can be a big edge when you are competing with big dog players on valuable keywords. It's the reason some of the TLD's below you on the TLD ladder are still worth a lot because of the ability to so easily get to the top of pages on keywords for those countries. In your case .info is neutral and has equal chance to show up among all countries making it more valuable in that sense. There are only a few domains that work like that, .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info. If you can .com and .net are far superior choices but I still see .info sites occasionally get to the top.
Now that we have the factors in mind that search engines like, lets see what traffic your keyword brings.
We will use the tool below to find out, it's free from google.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - broad spectrum figures
https://adwords.google.com/select/Tr...timatorSandbox - possible more realistic figures
I found that, xxxxx where that is just the keyword gets 8,100 on average global month searches. Most of those occurring in march and april. It's also got a good CPC rate of $3.22/click for ads showing that it's wanted by end-users since they are willing to pay quite a bit for each click from an ad.
There is a very interesting picture I found which illustrates the importance of being position #1 and #2 and why anything else underneath those positions in the search engine rankings is only of minor importance. This is important because my assumptions on the value in this section will be based on your domain being in position #1 or #2. The picture link is below.
