Should my City Name be in my Domain Name?

Once upon a time getting keywords inserted into a URL mattered. These were called exact match domains, or EMDs.

For a personal injury lawyer in Houston, for example, would mean selecting a domain name or URL such as HoutonPersonalInjuryLawyer.com.

The Google EMD Update

There was a time when owning an exact match domain resulted in high rankings.  As with most things on the Internet, people discovered a way to rank better and quickly spammed it.

Google is very smart these days though and it makes no sense to try and trick them.

The EMD update penalized low quality websites which were ranking well specifically due to their domain name. Google put up a patent for this back in 2003 and in 2012 they began dishing out penalties.

A simple rule of thumb can be applied here- make website for people and ignore the search engines.

Branding

There is nothing wrong with having a website with an exact match or partial match URL, just make sure that your content is unique and the website is very helpful and not spammy at all as it may catch the eye of a search engine at some point. If it makes sense for branding or is an awesome URL, go ahead and get it, just don’t spend a fortune on it.

There are plenty of real world examples of EMDs out there in the wild such as cars.com, shoes.com, diapers.com, etc. which all rank for the corresponding keyword.