Trading since 1987, and losing to a domain name somebody registered last year

17 August 2026 · Aston Gapes · about 5 minutes
Part of Get found

Say you have been trading since 1987. Three generations, a factory, a service department, people on the road who can talk a customer through a specification without opening a brochure.

And when a buyer searches for exactly what you sell, the first result is a website that did not exist two years ago, run by nobody in particular, whose entire idea was to register a domain name that reads like the search phrase.

Category, plus a city, bought as a web address. That is the whole strategy. And it is beating you.

It is not a fluke

We started noticing this and then started looking for it deliberately. Four times out of four, when we went looking, we found one: first place, first place, second place, and page one. In every case there were established suppliers below it with decades of trading, real stock, and people who actually know the product.

So why does that still work in 2026?

Less than it used to, and more than it should. Google reduced the weight it gives a keyword in a domain name years ago, and it is not really the explanation people assume. What is actually happening is duller and more instructive.

The domain forces the site to be about one thing. A website named after one product category tends to have a homepage, a page title and a heading all saying that category, because there is nothing else it could say. Meanwhile the established supplier's homepage says the company name, a tagline about quality and service, and lists nine product ranges.

Every link to it carries the phrase. The address is its own anchor text, everywhere anybody pastes it.

And it simply looks more relevant. Search results bold the words you typed, including in the web address, so on the page it appears to be the exact answer.

None of that is clever. It is focus, and it is beating experience because nobody ever put the experience on a page.

The thing not to do

Do not go and buy one. We can see why it is tempting — if that is what wins, buy the next domain along and take the position back. It goes badly, and we have watched it.

A second domain is a second website to write, maintain and get indexed. If you put real content on it, you are now competing with yourself for your own customers. One supplier we researched runs two live domains that open with the identical sentence, and Google appears to be treating them as two sites arguing about who is the real company — with three of the top eight results for their own brand name going to the wrong one of the two.

They own both. They are losing to themselves.

What to do instead, and it is cheaper

Build the page the exact-match domain is beating you with. One page, on the site you already have, about one thing, named after the phrase a buyer actually types.

Give it a heading that is the thing rather than your company name. Put enough words on it that a search engine has something to read — the most common finding in all our research is a handsome homepage with under five hundred characters of text on it, which looks expensive and says nothing. Then fill it with the specifics only you have: capacities, tolerances, lead times, what it suits, and honestly what it does not.

That last part is the bit the keyword domain can never copy. It does not know anything. You have thirty years of knowing which customer should not buy the cheaper model, and that is the most persuasive page on the internet if anybody would write it down.

And the faster route, while that settles

Organic position takes months. If somebody is buying your category this week, paid search puts you above all of it immediately — and in this market almost nobody is bidding, so it is the cheapest that position will ever be.

There is something quite satisfying about buying your way above a domain squatter for two dollars a click.