When planning a marketing strategy for your business one technique is often overlooked. You can use expired domains to your advantage if you know what you are doing.
Because it is a somewhat risky strategy, many marketers and managers are not inclined to use it. That is why we will show you how expired domains can help your business if you use this strategy adequately.
SEO benefits
If you can find expired domains with a good backlink profile (without spammy backlinks) and decent domain authority, you can use them for your SEO strategy. You can purchase those domains and create backlinks to your main website.
By creating backlinks from websites with solid rankings, you will secure a higher SERP position for your main website.
But be careful, the backlinks you create shouldn’t look like spam and without relevancy. You need to use corresponding anchors and keywords related to your business. Only then will you succeed in increasing your website’s ranking and visibility on search engines.
Before deciding if an expired domain is worth your time, you should check the quality of the backlinks. You can do that with the help of tools like Ahrefs or Majestic. By using these tools you will have access to the expired domain’s backlink profile.
That will allow you to decide whether the domain can be used for your SEO strategy or not.
Generating traffic
If you are lucky, you can identify and purchase domains that already had lots of traffic. You can then use those domains to redirect their traffic to your main website and start ranking on new keywords.
Remember that the backlink profile is the first thing you should check and traffic is only a bonus.
If the domain’s history is questionable, that traffic can bring you more harm than good. There is also a good chance that it was bot traffic or some other form of non-organic traffic, so think twice before going on with the purchase of shady expired domains.
Also, keep in mind that you probably cannot redirect much traffic, especially if it was generated by specific pieces of content.
However, you can create content that corresponds with that one (but improved) and try acquiring traffic, but that is advisable only if the content is similar to the one you have on your main website.
Brand recognition
Expired domains with recognizable names can be used for expanding your reach. You can create a separate brand (first check if it is still in use) or a new business entity around a memorable name.
Whatever you choose to do, it can be related to your main business, or you can start something completely different. It all depends on the business opportunity.
By creating a new brand or business entity, you can reach a new audience and expand your reach. That new entity can be advertised as a new page on your website, and you can try acquiring some of the web traffic if that side business becomes successful.
Expired domains threats
Using expired (and expiring) domains for your marketing strategy can be beneficial to many businesses. But it comes with several risks.
Some of the most common are:
- Using sites with spammy backlink profiles will get your website penalized.
- If you use too many sites with non-relevant content for building backlinks, it can be marked as black-hat SEO, and you will again get a ban.
- It is time-consuming, and results are not guaranteed because many people use this technique.
So, before using expired domains for your benefit, do due diligence and test the success of the strategy on a few examples.