Pros and Cons of Domain Type-in Traffic

Maybe you’ve heard or not heard of the mysterious power of domain type-in traffic.

Many claims have been made for and again domain type-in traffic.

Whether you have or have not, the beauty of domain type-in traffic is that domain type-in traffic is free.

Yes, free unlike any other search engine optimization and internet marketing.

And it goes without saying, SEO should not be neglected completely as SEO can act as a great mate to type-In traffic.

So briefly, domain type-in traffic is one of the most inexpensive search marketing options available for website owners seeking to increase website traffic, seeing you have the right resources and expertise to make it happen for your business.

The biggest questions I find myself faced with when considering buying expired domain names or hand registering domain names are are the domain names generic enough in nature to generate any type-in traffic or profitable traffic in general, and are type-in traffic domains worth owning?

And being totally transparent, I wish I could give you a straightforward answer of yes or no for those questions.

However, owning domains with type-in traffic that consistently generate increase web traffic, conversions and sales can be a hit or miss opportunity based upon the domain’s industry and keywords that make up the domain.

If you consider a new trend as generic or exact match domain names that might not produce traffic as much as traditional generic or exact match domain names produce.

That said, today’s post will try to help shed a little light on the pros and cons of using type-in traffic domains.

I set on my on quest to try and answer the type-in traffic domain question of whether or not type-in domains are worth owning or even considering as a method to increasing web traffic.

Domain Type-In Traffic Research

Over the past few months, I’ve been conducting my own research in regards to how effective or ineffective type-in traffic domains are in regards to generating traffic.

Owning a few hundred generic or exact match domain names, I set out to understand the following:

The various types of traffic visiting domains

• Are visitors humans or mainly bots, crawlers and spiders?
• Did visitors type in the domain or were they referred by another source such as a search engine or another website?

The overall traffic quantity per domain on a daily and monthly basis

Although I’ve yet to complete my domain type-in traffic research, I’ve discovered some interesting things to consider should you or your company find itself entertaining the thought of purchasing generic or exact match domain names for the sake of type-in traffic domains.

I created a landing page and set up my own tracking capabilities to measure roughly 100 generic or exact match domain names.

Essentially when a visitor visits one of the 100 generic or exact match domain names, they are taken to a landing page.

Behind the scenes, I track the visitor’s referring address or URL and their IP address.

And so I launched and was quite impressed and excited to find numbers jumping into the double digits only after 4-6 hours after launching domains.

The next day I looked at the report and I was very convinced that generic or exact match domain names generate large amounts of type-in traffic.

That is until I looked further into the IP addresses to find out that most of the visits were from crawlers, bots, and spiders.

Whoops, I forgot to place a “noindex” robot meta tag within the landing page the 100 generic or exact match domain names were being directed too.

Because I failed to do this, the landing pages were being indexed by search engines and artificially inflating my domain type-in traffic report numbers.

But all hope is not lost, because from this inadvertent finding, I was able to begin to track search engine IP’s and not count those visits as visitors which give greater clarity to exactly how many domains were being visited by human visitors via type-in or referral.

Once I made the change to not include IP’s from bots, spiders, and crawlers, most websites were seeing 2-4 visits a day after 30 days of consecutive tracking that were considered type-in traffic.

Out of the 100 or so generic or exact match domain names I used, only 5 had 10 or more daily visits on average that were considered type-in traffic.

And out of those 5, only one had 30 or more daily visits on average that were considered type-in traffic. And yes, all visits were unique visitors.

And the Domain Type-In Traffic Verdict is…

And there you have it, domain type-in traffic does exist.

So on one hand we can say yes, but there is much more to this story as we’ve only scratched the surface in determining domain type-in traffic does exists.

I think it is safe to say that domain type-in traffic exists for generic or exact match domain name.

However, the more important and challenging questions to identify and answer are whether or not:

• The domain being used is classified or categorized as a generic or exact match domain name.
• The overall traffic or search popularity of the generic or exact match domain names being used.
• The type-in traffic was ready to buy or looking to buy.
• The type-in traffic would have converted if there were a developed website selling products or services in close association to the keywords used in the generic or exact match domain name.

There are many more other considerations to be researched and discussed.

Those bulleted items mentioned above are just some of the broader aspects to consider when trying to determine whether owning domains with type-in traffic are worth it or not.

Personally speaking, I would say they are worth owning based on my finding thus far.

However, I hope to take my findings to the next level by having a few of the 100 or so generic or exact match domain names used developed into websites based around the keywords used within the domain.

You’ll have to stick around for the next update to find out which websites were developed and how they are progressing in terms of conversion and profitability. In the meantime, I leave you with a list of pros and cons of type-in traffic domain names.

Pros of type-in traffic domain names

• No heavy investments as type-in traffic is free as there will be no need to optimize for search engine indexing.
• Saves time and effort in comparison to SEO efforts.
• Type-in traffic is easy to understand and not as complicated as SEO and is self-explanatory.
• Type-in traffic is user friendly as users can find what they want directly without any need of search and saves time browsing various search results.
• Better branding and advertisement allows you to develop entire brands and trademarked goods around generic or exact match domains that receive type-in traffic.
• Easy-to-remember and action oriented type-in traffic domains will often be quick to type and catchy to attract potential customers and repeat business.

Cons of type-in traffic domain names

• Type-in traffic domains can be expensive depending on how competitive the domain keywords are in terms of search volume and pay-per-click (ppc) costs.
• Finding the generic names can be a challenge to find especially when trying to match the generic names to your keywords.
• Your competition could use your domain type-in traffic strategy against you and beat you to the next available lucrative domain name options.