Are domains with a keyword in them good for SEO? Not since 2012.
A couple years ago, a domain squatter offered to sell "massachusettstriallawyer.com" to one of my clients for $500. They came to me for a sanity check. Short answer was "No", and the long answer was
So let's talk about why.
"Exact Match Domains" – when the domain name has a useful keyword in it
Google has confirmed publicly that having a keyword in the domain is not a ranking factor:
"…just because keywords are in a domain name doesn't mean that it'll automatically rank for those keywords. And that's something that's been the case for a really, really long time."
"...it's kind of normal that [those sites] would rank for those keywords [but the fact] that they happen to have them in their domain name is kind of unrelated to their current ranking."
This has been the case for a long time. In the early days of Google, a domain name was a factor in Google's algorithm and rankings – it could get a brand-new website onto page 1 of Google in days. That was enough to create an entire cottage industry in speculatively buying domains names and selling them.
When I say "early days" I really do mean early. Google filed for a patent on using things like EMDs as a spam signal in 2003! They then took a long time to implement it – not until 2012 did they finally make it a penalty. Why they let it keep working for a decade is frankly a puzzle to me – maybe they felt it was sometimes useful and that they were able to compensate for abuse with other data. In any case, since it worked for over a decade, that's enough to create a very persistent myth that domain name is important.
But could it help?
Not on its domain name alone. If there is a rigorous effort in creating a new site with lots of relevant content that is super helpful to trial lawyers and their clients, sure, that could work. But the $500 purchase price of the domain is the least important (and least expensive) possible part of such a project.
If I were embarking on a project to create a new site especially for or about Mass trial lawyers, I'd probably name it something super brandable like TheTortsAndTheHare.com. Really. PoetsAndQuants.com is a fantastic example of a site that went from non-existent to daily reading for the MBA school industry in just a few years. Under the old EMD principle they should have named themselves daily-business-school-news.com. They did not.
What about competitors who are using these domains with keywords?
There are a lot of these keyword-based URLs in the legal space – the consumer side is absolutely riddled with the things. My favorite is bostoninjurylawyerblog.com. Classy… not. Most of these have been around for a long time, since before the EMD update. That bostoninjurylawyerblog.com was registered in 2008, for example. And because it has a decade's worth of content, it ranks pretty decently. From 2008–2012 the domain name probably helped it get established, but since then, it's been running on its own search juice, with lots of useful content.
That long history of lots of content is why the site still ranks. Not because of its domain name.
(I'm also not sure it will keep ranking. That site has been hemorrhaging backlinks. It's lost 40% of links since its peak in Jan 2019, and it never did break 100 unique linking domains. All but one of those domains are content farms or link farms.)
Citations:
Deconstructing The Google EMD Update, Search Engine Land, 2012
John Muller for Google: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours, go to 52 minute mark, YouTube, July 2018
Matt Cutts for Google: How important is it to have keywords in a domain name?, YouTube, March 2011
