Wednesday, February 25, 2015

VinoRouge.club: Ranked on Page 1 of Google in Less Than 48 Hours


Being a member of a twelve-member wine club that meets once a month for the last 22+ years provided motivation to finally create website to document what our club does.  What do we do you may ask...we taste red wine.  In fact, between all of our regular tastings and special tastings, we've tasted thousands of red wines over the years from all over the world and we have kept detailed records of the tasting we've done over that time, including a member preference poll for each tasting we have ever had.  Now that we are well into the digital age, we decided it was time to create a website for our wine club, so that we could share with the world what we've been up to and provide some insight on what our collective pallets like the most.

When considering a domain name for our wine club, it only seemed natural to register a dot club domain name, VinoRouge.club, since that is our name and a club is what we are!    Oh, and the dot com was already taken.  That IS the beauty of a new gtld!  It is a niche...it is available... and it is what it is, not to sound like Frank Zappa or Bill Belichick.  

New gTLDs just may have a leg up in search engine marketing.  Recently in Las Vegas at Namescon 2015, Bill Hartzer, Senior SEO Strategist at Globe Runner SEO, participated in a speaking panel about search engine optimization and an experiment he conducted using exact match domains in dot com and a new gTLD.  In the example he provided, he talked about two domain names that he developed with identical content, 3caratdiamonds.com and 3carat.diamonds.  What Bill shared was that getting traffic through Google Adwords cost a bit less for the new gTLD than it did for the dot com.  Bill also shared the fact that over time, the conversion rates (for downloading a PDF about diamond sizing) were also better for the new gTLD than they were for the dot com.  

Okay, while this is not earth shattering, it is, perhaps, an indication that search engines may prefer new gTLDs over time, as they are more significantly niche focused, they have fresh content since they are new and they are relevant to the search being conducted, although nobody's is admitting that over there.   

I have also heard several stories about new gTLD websites ranking well in organic search.  One specific story was about Credit.club and how only after two weeks, they were ranked in the first position for a Google search of Credit Club.  Granted, there was a lot of publicity, news stories and links that preceeded the ranking, due to credit.club being hand registered for regular fee.  However, regarding my newly launched VinoRouge.club, it is interesting to note that after only 48 hours (with no publicity, news stories or links), the website is ranking on page 1 of Google for a search of Vino Rouge (out of over 3.5 million results) and in the first position for Vino Rouge Club.  No magic SEO here, just fresh and interesting content, as well as a new gTLD domain name.  Time will tell if it was just luck, but my hunch is that this year will start to see more and more new gTLD websites being successful because of favorable rankings and cheaper advertising options.  I know I'm looking forward to trying it again soon with a different new gTLD domain name.  If the results are similar, I'll be sure to come back here and let you all know about it!  Thanks for reading and remember, don't drink wine and register domain names at the same time!

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