I love it when I stumble across a great Internet marketing case study as I am just going about my day-to-day life.
Last month, my wife and I took a quick day trip to Buffalo, New York. At one point during the day, we needed to call for a local taxi, so my wife whipped out her mobile phone and began dialing. I was puzzled as to how she happened to have the number of a Buffalo taxi company at her fingertips. So I asked her about this.
As it turns out, my wife – who is the more practical one in the family – knew that we’d need the services of a local cab company while we were in Buffalo, so prior to our trip she had turned to our mutual friend, Google, for help.
It turns out that she had typed "Buffalo taxi" into the search engine. My wife was presented with the first 10 results out of over 3 million. Quickly scanning the Google results page, she saw "Buffalo Taxi Cab" (second from the top) and the URL www.buffalotaxicab.com. And that’s what she clicked on. And that’s who got my wife’s business. (Yes, even with the crappy, one-page Website that currently resides there.)
I was intrigued by all of this, so I asked my wife how and why she chose this particular taxi company. She explained to me that the number one thing that got her attention was the fact that the company had "the best Website address." She went on to explain that, based on the fact that this company was using buffalotaxicab.com as their domain, she figured they were "legitimate" and "had their act together."
My wife is right, of course. buffalotaxicab.com is a terrific generic domain name that not only clearly explains what the company has to offer, it is intuitive from a type-in perspective, and it is also loaded with the keywords that are ideal for high search engine ranking.
The thing I found most interesting was that the clever company that owned this domain name consists of just two guys with two cabs. But by having this great generic domain name, two guys with two cabs beat out dozens of larger competitors for my wife’s business.
Way to go, guys. And thanks for planning ahead, honey.