A while back, Google My Business launched a few new features, including the ability to make posts and the ability to create a website. I’ve written about these before. Just recently, though, I started looking into how successful these new Google My Business websites are. In effort to see more data about them, I’ve used a few tools to do a deep dive into the data about Business.Site. After all, Business.Site is, in fact a New gTLD domain name (.SITE is a Top Level Domain), and Business.Site is a domain name.
Google My Business is offering verified businesses a chance to create their own one-page website, from right inside Google My Business. I have created my own site over here: http://bill-hartzer-seo-consultant.business.site/
You’ll notice a few things about that URL, though:
- The URL is NOT an HTTPs URL. With all of the efforts lately that Google has been making to get businesses to move over to HTTPs, you’d think that this one would be HTTPs. It should be pretty easy to make it HTTPs, as they own the domain name and would only have to buy the certificate and install it on their web server. But, there are potentially more technical issues, so I won’t go in that here. Nonetheless, it is concerning to me that it’s NOT HTTPs.
- The URL of each site built is, in fact, a subdomain of business.site.
- The URL, you’ll notice, does include some keywords. But, they are limiting the keywords in the URL. For example, I couldn’t get seo-consultant.business.site or even seoconsultant.business.site for my URL because those were taken by others. Depending on your industry, you may be able to get a good keyword rich domain name. But, for now, you have to get what’s available, just like domain names. If you’re also wondering, I don’t think there’s any way that you can “sell” or transfer your business.site name or URL to someone else. I don’t know, for example, whether or not if someone deletes their business.site whether or not the name becomes available or whether Google just keeps it. That’s another test for another time.
- You are limited to one page per website.
- You are limited to one website per Google My Business listing. As far as I know you’d need to add another location in order to take advantage of another business.site website.
Since Business.Site is, in fact, a domain name, I started to look into some of the data behind business.site. Here’s some interesting stats:
According to SEMrush.com, the business.site websites, as a whole, get about 5,000 visits a month from organic search:
And, there are actually several local businesses who are using Google AdWords to drive traffic to their business.site website:
That’s 16,400 visits via paid search to business.site websites, but that’s down this month. Down a whopping 34 percent. So, apparently those GMB listing owners don’t think it’s a solid investment. Since they can’t track the visits and leads very easily (although you could track the leads through links on the page using tracking parameters), I don’t think they’re savvy enough to do that. Nonetheless, they’ve collectively spent about $55,000 US dollars recently.
And finally, take a look at the competitors:
- Yelp.com
- Facebook.com
- Yellowpages.com
- Mapquest.com
- TripAdvisor.com
And finally, if you’re wondering, there are about 639,000 (or so) business.site web pages (websites) indexed in Google. You can see them by using this search query: site:business.site
The one that’s ranking the best, with the most search engine traffic for their main keyword? Touch of Soul.
By the way, you can buy your own .SITE domain name at registrars, including NameCheap. In a recent search at NameCheap, I’ve been able to find unique .site domain names available for as little as $.88 cents for the first year of registration.
Google My Business Case Study
I recently completed in-depth research about Business.Site and Google’s use of this domain name for Google My Business websites. Read more about Google My Business websites, and download my Business.Site Google My Business case study.
