A great domain name for your website or blog is good for both visitors and search engines. Some domain names are also valuable properties worth investing in. But what makes a good one? Use these tools.
I give lots of tips for choosing a great domain name in this article: How to choose the perfect URL for your blog or website. However, what you think might be a good name domain may not be. It is easy to think you have a great URL when it may fall flat with visitors and be ignored by search engines.
How can you tell if you have chosen a good domain name for your next website or blog? Would a domain name make a good investment? Will it be worth anything in the future? You can only guess, but you could get a second opinion and there are some useful free tools on the web that will estimate how much a domain name is potentially worth. The more a domain name is worth, the better it is and it can add value to your website or blog.
You can get a valuation of the likely worth of a domain name before you even register it using free online tools. They enable you to find domain names that are potentially worth something and to avoid ones that are worthless. Without spending any money, you could find a domain name that is worth thousands before you even begin to build the website. A good domain name makes a site even more valuable.
Here are some great domain name tools. Bear in mind that they look at the domain name only, which is the text of the URL. They do not look at the website. In fact, they value a domain name even for websites not yet built or registered.
Estibot
Estibot says it appraises over 2 million domains a day and it offers subscription plans that enable you to submit up to 5,000 domains a day. The site is clearly aiming at people that bulk submit domains in the hope of finding a diamond among all the dirt. It can be used for free a couple of times each day (more if you are sneaky and use a VPN).
The site is easy to use and after entering a domain name a report is displayed almost instantly. The value is displayed at the top and if it is known to be on sale somewhere, the price is shown.
Estibot tries to find keywords in the domain name and it evaluates the worth based on those words. It usually does a good job, but if it does not find the keywords, you can enter them (a paid feature though). It didn’t think much of my domain idea and said it was worth just $100, partly because it saw ‘moneysaving geek’ and not ‘money saving geek’. I didn’t want to pay to correct it.
It lists websites it thinks are similar and shows what the domain names sold for. This can be useful when it correctly identifies similar sites, but sometimes it does not. However, this could be an indication of a poor choice of domain name on your part.
There are some useful statistics, like the number of search results on Google for the domain name or words in it. It also shows the search volume and the number of advertisers on Google associated with the domain name. This is valuable information.
If the domain name is not worth much, it tells you why it thinks this.
I like Estibot, but you really need to try a lot of domains to find a good one and that is a minimum of $29 a month. However, one month may be sufficient as it allows 150 lookups a day.
Nameboy
Nameboy is a domain name ideas generator. It does not value domain names, but it could be used to generate domain names which you then feed into Esitbot or the other tools to see how much they are worth.
It could not be simpler. You just enter a small number of keywords, two for example, and then it generates a list of possible domain names. It tells you which ones have already been taken and which ones are still available to register.
Nameboy puts your keywords together and adds various TLDs like .com, org, .biz, .blog and so on. It also adds words before, like my, test, pro, the, thedaily and so on. It also adds words to the end, like cloud, about, tech, online and so on. The result is a long list of domains and you can see which are available to buy.
This online tool is a great way to generate ideas for domain names. Even if you don’t use one of the suggestions, it will give you plenty of ideas for URLs.
GoDaddy Domain Appraisals
GoDaddy provides many domain name services and you can buy and sell domain names on the site. There is an auction section with lists of domain names for sale, bids, prices and so on. It is worth browsing the auctions and seeing what is on offer and for what price, just to get an idea of what domains are worth.
If you have a domain or an idea for one, GoDaddy Domain Appraisals is worth a visit. As with the other tools, there is nothing to it and you simply enter a real or made up domain name and a report is immediately displayed.
The estimated value of the domain is shown and it lists the reasons why it came to that figure. For example, other similar domains may have been sold in the past, the name may contain valuable or popular words.
Similar domain names that have sold are listed, along with their price. Similar domain names that have not yet been registered are also listed, along with the cost and a link to buy them. Unregistered domains are very cheap, just a few dollars, and are tempting.
This is a useful tool that backs up its domain value estimates with solid facts. It doesn’t mean it is always right, but at least it tries. There is an interesting Domain Investing section of the GoDaddy website that is worth visiting too.
NameWorth
Create a free account at NameWorth and you can analyze five domain names a day and get a report on them. Any more than this and you need to pay for a subscription plan. The cheapest starts at $9.99 a month for 600 lookups a month.
As usual, you just enter a real domain name or one you think you might want and it immediately shows a report. The valuation of my made-up domain was high. Twice that of GoDaddy and thousands more than Estibot. It thought it was high value tier 3, but also thought demand was at the low end of moderate.
Further down the page it gets much more interesting and it presents several scenarios, each with different valuations. The highest valuation and the top scenario is Retail Level and that is the $3,450 in the screenshot. It also says that a domain investor might pay $766, it may sell at auction for $173 and a liquidation fire sale might bring just $52.
These different scenarios are interesting and it presents not only the values, but reasons why it chose the values for the scenarios. For example, the likely buyer profile, whether it would be an impulse buy, the percentage chance of it selling and so on.
It is up to you to decide which valuation is the right one and the range from best to worst is large, but it does give you plenty to think about and is therefore useful. One of the scenarios will be right, but which one?
Free Valuator
Free Valuator is a free tool that analyzes any real or made-up domain name you care to enter. You only get one free valuation per day unless you create a free account, which bumps up the limit to three valuations.
The report is immediate and contains some useful information. Unfortunately, it made a mess of my test URL and it split it up into the words ‘moneys, av, in, ggeek’ which is completely wrong. This resulted in a valuation of $38, clearly because of the nonsensical words it found. This was disappointing.
Real sites return real information, like an estimate of backlinks, domain age, Moz domain and page authority. I’m not sure how accurate this information is though.
I think the other domain valuation tools are better. However, there is a domain name generator elsewhere on the site. Enter a keyword and it generates a list of domains, mainly by adding words to yours, either before or after, with or without a hyphen. The results could be useful if you are stuck for ideas.
Summing up
So which is best and which should you use? If you have narrowed down your choice of domain name to a small number, why not use all of the tools here? All provide free access to domain name valuations and reports. If you need to bulk value dozens of domain names, you will need a paid subscription at these sites.
I liked NameWorth because of the different scenarios and you are given a range of valuations from low to high. GoDaddy is pretty good and I liked the valuation and the reasons given for it. It did not under or over price a site. The valuation was somewhere in the middle and therefore likely to be realistic.
