Website Marketing Directory — Search Engine Optimisation — Melbourne, Sydney, Australia

The concept of direct navigation is as old as the web-- internet users frequently key in their favorite sites stored in their personal memory. To put this into context, WebSideStory, Inc.'s StatMarket division notes that more than two-thirds of daily global internet users arrive at a website via direct navigation, compared with just 14 percent of traffic from search engines.

But the phenomenon of direct navigation to generically named sites with an "intent to search" is a relatively new concept that shifts how marketers must think about their own website traffic and how consumers are finding information about the things that interest them.

Marketers are turning to direct navigation programs to complement their search campaigns for a number of reasons, including the emergence of programs like AdSense and other technologies which can populate unused web domains with information to create mini-portals. Online consumers are turning to these "parked" websites -- pages populated mostly by relevant keyword ads -- because they can sometimes produce better, quicker results that avoid the manipulated listings that increasingly clog search engine results for highly commercial keyword terms.

In fact, it is estimated by several organizations that traffic to parked pages drives about 10 percent of the pay-per-click (PPC) ad market. Even more interesting, WebSideStory found that direct navigation had a 4.23 percent conversion-to-sale rate, while search engine clicks on average lead to a 2.3 percent conversion-to-sales rate.

With that much quality traffic heading to these generic sites, organizations are now considering how to capture that traffic directly. Consider that a parked page like Wifi.com, for example, captures 15,000 monthly targeted visitors. Purchasing this volume of traffic through a pay-per-click search engine would cost nearly $10,000 per month (based upon the current top Yahoo! bid price of $0.66 for the term Wifi). Yet the domain name is currently listed for sale at domain marketplace Sedo.com with an asking price of $350,000-- an investment that would pay for itself in under three years, even faster if current trends of rising traffic and click prices continue. So instead of writing a hefty check to Google or Yahoo every month, why not purchase the domain and secure this traffic for life?

Marketers can use generic targeted domain names as a traffic source in three primary ways:

Finding the right domains for direct navigation
There are a number of things to consider when determining which domain names to acquire in your direct navigation initiatives. Much of it gets back to marketing basics-- who is your audience and how can you reach them?

Once you identify the domains you'd like, there are a variety of ways to acquire them. If you're lucky and the domains are still available, you just need to choose a domain registrar and pay an annual registration fee of around $10 to $35. If the domains are already taken -- and most good traffic domains are -- you still have options: You can try researching the domain owner and making an unsolicited offer, or browse the listings at a domain name marketplace where you'll find thousands of high traffic domain names that are definitely for sale. If all of that sounds like a bit too much work, you can always hire a domain broker to do all of the legwork, including tracking down owners, negotiating a price and assisting with the ownership transfer.

Direct navigation as a marketing investment
As a marketer, investing in direct navigation generally pays for itself within a year or two, dependent of course on the quality of the domain and how well you can convert the traffic into sales. However, instead of being an expense, as with purchasing clicks from a search engine, acquiring a domain (or portfolio of domains) for direct navigation purposes becomes an asset that retains its value (possibly even increasing in value) and can even be re-sold again in the future should your marketing objectives change. Domain name prices have risen dramatically over the past years as the supply of quality available names becomes ever smaller, and with more and more businesses coming online every day, that picture is unlikely to change anytime soon.

Only a few very savvy firms have already discovered that in this click-hungry era where many companies blow tens of thousands of dollars each month on PPC advertising, that purchasing targeted generic domain names delivers the same type of high quality targeted visitors at a much, much lower cost.