Meet Stacy Caprio
Stacy wanted to change her life, forget what it feels like to feel trapped inside a cubicle, and have brighter “highlight-of-the-day” moments than getting up to get coffee or go to the water cooler. So she leveraged her experience with creating and optimizing ad campaigns and SEO to drive online growth for clients and businesses, into doing the same thing for her own websites and being on the receiving end of ad revenue. She then pivoted and created the Her.CEO podcast and platform, teaching others about buying, growing, and selling websites, entrepreneurship, and how to bring more freedom and flexibility into your life.
She must have a lot of experience buying aged domains, right?
Wrong. Stacy has built new sites on fresh domains, or worked with websites with current traffic and revenue, but never with an aged domain. Although, she was always curious.
Building a site on a domain that already had links and search engine trust, skipping the link building grind, and simply populating it with content, with the potential to rank again with minimal effort seemed intriguing to her.
So she decided to give it a try and, you guessed it, got it right the first time and came to Odys Global. She heard about us through some of her favorite SEO newsletters and decided to give it a try. The deciding factors were that our domains are high DA, high quality, pre-vetted for quality backlinks, and we keep them live, so she didn’t have to “reanimate” them. Having never bought a domain with no current traffic before, it took Stacy several days to work up the courage. And in her words, “…looking back I’m very glad I did”.
Choosing between aged domains and aged domain platforms
Besides buying a domain from Odys, Stacy also took the time to buy another domain through GoDaddy. She spent several days looking through domains on SEMRush, found a couple that were somewhat usable, and placed a backorder. Afterward she had to wait for a month, and enter an auction (luckily, short lived) bidding war. Stacy describes how having to look for the right domain and manually checking its quality can be too time consuming, taking into account how you can still lose the bidding war, or overpay and regret it later.
Afterward, she developed a soft spot for a marketplace like Odys, since you know what’s readily available at a moment’s notice, don’t have to wait for a month to try and get it, and know the final price from the moment you laid eyes on the domain for you.
Once she made her choice and purchase, it was time to get to work
Stacy went with a domain that was a DA 33, with around 1.2k backlinks, most of which were from other high-quality domains, like .gov websites. Initially it was ranking for a small handful of keywords.
Once the domain rights were transferred to her fully, the first thing she did was look up all the high-link, high-traffic pages. The ones that had at least 2 high quality links were 301-redirected to new keyword researched pages that targeted the same keywords.
The next step was predictable, because as we all know – content is king. She added new content, to be more precise over 70 new category pages and thousands of content-specific pages. Stacy made sure to not copy the pages word for word, not even for the URLs. Her advice, as well as our recommendation, is to keyword research new URLs that can rank better, and then 301 redirect the old URLs to the new ones. Last, and most certainly not least, is for the new content to be high quality, but around the same topic, so you don’t get flagged for plagiarism or copyright infringement.
And then it was time to wait. And wait she did, for 6 months to be exact.
Expectation & Results
The website started getting traffic from the exact moment that Stacy set it up. During the first month only, she got 418 visitors. All of her exact match intent keywords started ranking right away. And in 6 months that number rose to 759 visitors. One important thing to note is that Stacy’s domain achieved these results without any link building whatsoever, only through new content.
The one thing she would do differently in retrospect, would go for spot on site relevancy. While she managed to match the niche quite nicely, it was still more of an overlap. As a result her exact niche keywords, went sky high in the span of a couple of days. While the keywords that only overlapped still had some growth, and landed on page 2 or 3 after 6 month, it was more similar to the progression of a normal site.
Stacy’s thoughts on why would you choose aged domains
You will benefit from Google’s trust, because of the domain’s age, authority, history of traffic, rankings, and visitor engagement. Leveraging the power and links of an aged domain will definitely rank your site quicker and with less effort. Just make sure not to forget to choose an exact-match niche, 301-redirect old website pages, and create new and original content to dodge any copyright fuss.
Our curated aged domains on the Odys marketplace, offer you all the benefits that Stacy’s case study described, at half the effort necessary. They are just as easy to handle for both industry veterans like her, and for fresh faces alike. So if you were considering delving into aged domains, now is the time to take the final space and look into Odys Global!
