URL Search is defined by Google as when a user types a URL such as www.myspace.com into the search box. It differs slightly from Navigational Search which is where a user types the name of the site e.g. “myspace” rather than the URL.

Most people who search for URL’s don’t realise they are doing anything wrong - some of them are hijacked by Googles very clever line of JavaScript that moves the cursor from the browser address bar to the Google search box when the Google homepage is loaded.

Ranking highly for popular URL’s can send a huge amount of traffic and is a great way to target your competitors customers.

For example if you saw your competitor running a newspaper advert with a URL such as xxxxxxxx.com/offer at the end of the advert you can expect people to be searching for that URL on the major search engines.

The image below shows the traffic Blogstorm received in the last 2 weeks from people searching for “www.direct.gov.uk/taxdisc” (see results page here). If a tax disc was a commercial product that I could sell then this traffic would be pretty valuable. Although the total is 8,019 the figures for the last few days have been around 2,000 per day.

Keywords

Of course you need to have a catchy title otherwise nobody will click on your listing, it also helps to be competing with people who have no clue about SEO.

Ranking for these sorts of pages is pretty easy because they usually have very little competition unless you are targeting major sites. Certainly if you stick to a niche industry you can often outrank the original site or at least come second.

As well as keeping an eye on URLs that your competitors are publishing offline a great way to find popular URLs to target is by using the Google Keyword Tool. Simply enter “www” as your keyword and it comes up with a list of popular URLs which can be ordered and sorted as you wish.

Google Suggest is also a great way to find commonly searched for domains and even pages within domains.

By Patrick Altoft on August 4th, 2008