They were happy to spend their money to promote their brands than buying domains in this way.

http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/three-good-reasons-to-target-long-tail-keywords

There are only so many live auction spots and I think that they try to average at least say $10K per spot.

If a domain is only going to fetch $3K they probably won’t put it in.

You want to change the perception then go out and spend 5 figures for these domain and repoirt the purchases, or sell domain like these for 5 figures and report the sales.

If people see success they copy it.

If a three or four word .com domain with a monthly average search volume of 1,000+ exact searches has a high likelihood of quickly attaining a top ten search result position, why shouldn’t it be sold in a live auction along side the one word and two word off label TLD domains?

Your not going to see 4 word domains chosen for major live domain auctions but I have seen them and bought them in the extended or silent part of the auctions.

If price is any indicator, the amount most domainers are willing to pay for a three or four word .com (related to a marketable product or service) with an average monthly volume of EXACT Google searches in excess of 1,000 is barely above reg fee!

Instead they opt to spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars on two word .com domains (and single word off label TLDs) that have so much keyword competition and so many competing published pages that their newly published sites are unlikely to ever digitally grace the first few pages of any search engine results.

All the while, they’re singing the praises of SEO and the placement they will have someday, while at the same time three and four word .com domains are quietly moving into a top ten placement position within weeks of publishing.

Because keyword metrics and other real word results are freely available for analysis, it is beyond my understanding that many domains which seem to be among the least capable of generating any sort of income without throwing significant marketing dollars at them still manage to be the domain darlings of the resale market.

I think domainers get this, at least I do.

Listen to my radio show on domainsuccess.com last week and you will hear me talk about the second best domain, or the 10th best domain, many of these are three words.

I have a ton of these

The big secret that nobody will share is that three and four word keyword domains based on popular searches will do 90% of the job of getting top search engine ranking provided the page is not parked, is a .com, and you aren’t trying to game the system.

While the entire domain industry bids single and two word domains through the stratosphere, it is the three and four word domains that appear at the top of their respective categories day after day after day.

Never mind about Madison Avenue, when will domainers get it?

The title of the post is misleading – it’s spend for paid search, not SEO, so there is no need to bag on SEO (MHB – correction perhaps, or clarification?).

The research shows a tremendous opportunity, though I will say that the analysis is only touching on a portion of what enterprise sites are actually getting from natural search channel. I work on many large F500 accounts, and can say first hand that they do quite well in natural search on the whole – some are getting over $1 billion annually. But the study wouldn’t be able to validate that, because they have no access to their subject’s analytics data. Still, the more popular paid search terms with no visibility are a great place to start an optimization campaign.