Exact match domains: what are they, and can they lift your rankings?

Exact match domains (EMDs) have been hotly debated among SEO gurus for years. Some swear by them. Some say there is no relevance at all.

I recently ran my own small scale experiment for a little macOS utility app I built, on the exact match domain my-exact-match-domain. Within three weeks it was ranking #1, with almost no backlinks and very little SEO presence.

What I tested

One domain, three moves, and one overall result. The moves changed the ranking, and the order they landed in matters:

1. 1The site launched on the domain, but with a different brand name in the H1.No ranking
2. 2The exact match phrase went into the H1 and multiple places across the site.#3 overnight for the phrase match
3. 3A couple of blog posts with good quality content went up.#3 to #1, almost instantly across several similar phrases
4. 4The average position across the whole test.Jumped from 40 -> 17~ average

Now, this is a super small volume keyword, in a niche that is frankly tapped out. Total search volumes were between 100 and 1000 per month. So, was this a good test?

I think so. So far it has proved that for low volume keywords, an exact match domain lets you rank super easily.

What everyone else has found

My result is one site and one keyword. Here is how it sits next to the people who have run the numbers at scale, where the consensus and the measured data point in opposite directions.

Google’s own people have stayed cool on the tactic since. John Mueller, on keyword-keyword domains, in 2023:

Every objection there is a business objection. None of them is “it will not rank.”

For that, the useful number is a study by Digital Leverage: 51 Swiss keywords, 509 top ten results containing an exact match domain. Here is what it takes to rank in each camp.

A quarter of the authority, same page. At the extreme end of their sample it is not close:

That is the same shape as a three week old site with almost no backlinks at #1. And it clusters at the top, not the bottom:

That’s it then? Buy exact match domains and use them to rank?

Well not so fast, you probably should ask yourself the question of if you intend to invest long term into the site or not, because exact match domains will give you search relevance for only a single search term which could change over time, and it also inhibits your ability to build a brand.

If you think about it purely from first principles, exact match domains are probably a bad idea even though they clearly work to drive traffic.

Why?

Because you can’t build a brand around an exact match domain, and an enduring brand is the strongest leverage a company can have. Exact match domains are great for specific niches which you don’t think will really have long term viability for a quick traffic boost, and that’s why you see smaller SEO guys raving about them.

They can probably get you your first $ on the internet faster than anything else, but $10k, $100k, $1m? That’s going to require a lot more than a little traffic boost from a single keyword. That’s going to require a product, marketing and a brand.

What I am going to test next - high volume search terms with exact match domains

I managed to snag a much higher volume exact match domain, if my hypothesis holds I think I will be able to rank it in the top three in under a month with the right content. Where it will get hard will be if that domain authority will carry over to other related articles over time, and actually translate into a real business.

Sources

1. 1The EMD Update: Google Issues “Weather Report” Of Crack Down On Low Quality Exact Match DomainsDanny Sullivan, Search Engine Land, 28 September 2012
2. 2Google’s John Mueller Cautions Against Keyword-Rich DomainsSearch Engine Journal, 15 February 2023
3. 3Exact Match Domains: ranking advantage or myth?Digital Leverage, study of 51 Swiss keywords, late 2024
4. 4Your Guide to Google’s Exact Match Domain Algorithm UpdateSearch Engine Journal, algorithm history