Exact match domain vs a brand domain

john | Jan. 12, 2021, 4:35 a.m.

I don't remember the day but I was talking with a friend of mine about the benefit vs drawback of a exact match domain vs a brand domain.

I guess first I should explain what an exact match domain is, simply put, it would be the .com of what ever search the user might be doing in a search engine, such as google, bing, yandex, long or short, say "cars" the exact match would be cars.com, or "used cars" the exact match would be usedcars.com

Now a brand domain, would be something like Yout or IBM.  Now of course these words mean nothing.  So they can be anything.

The discussion was that there was a company back in the day that had started out with an exact match domain in a specific sector.  Say cupakes.com and from there they went on and bought donuts.com, as they developed each out as one or both grew then acquiring a third, and so on.

They then got a point where they had decided they should instead make a brand, instead of managing each of the sites individually.  So they launched a unified amazon type site, and redirected all their sites to the respective location on their brand site.

Of course their brand site went on to either go public or sold off for a large amount .  Either way that would be determined a success.  This of course showed that if you just start out as a brand in the beginning and execute well you can do everything.

So I guess it's more of semantics and my love for exact match domains given that I still think an exact match domain is the best way to enter any niche, and perhaps maybe not the best, but the most ever green if done well. 

Now of course if you start expanding into other niches, or that was your original plan, I still think the scenario in which I described it would of still been beneficial to have launched an individual brand site and put a sort of "powered by" and maintained each of them running once you have enough exact matches or are doing well enough in one niche that you dominate it so well that you move onto the next, that it would be foolish to not, at least dominate twice the amount of the niche.  I think more specifically because each niche has it quirks as well so by unifying you end up neglecting those.