Pizza as a Brand. Why Pizza.com is missing the boat!

There is no denying that Pizza.com is a great domain name. However, for those of you who think that owning a one-word .com like this can get you top-rankings in Google, time to think again. At the time of this posting Pizza.com is still on the first page of Google, but located at the very bottom almost on page two.

pizza_google

As you can see from the listings here, above the fold I can clearly see the major brands in the Pizza world, Dominos, Papa Johns, and Pizza Hut, followed by a listing of Pizza places near my house. If you keep scrolling down you can finally make it to poor little Pizza.com that is now relegated to the rarely-seen bottom of Google page one.

So what happened here?

Well we all know that Google likes big brands which is why we see the three giants in the Pizza world dominating the top spots. Couple that with Google’s preference for local businesses and page one is actually really hard to rank well on for pizza. Of course not everyone that wants to order Pizza just types “pizza” into Google. In some cases people will look for Pizza in their local area, so they would type something like “pizza Santa Monica” which leave Pizza.com completely in the dust. I scrolled all the way to page three of Google and still had no sign of the category-defining .com name.

What happened here is that Pizza.com failed to innovate and provide anything that useful to the customer. When I look-up pizza places in my area I get a bland-looking list of restaurants and then a generic description of what the Pizza place is. No interaction with Yelp, no Twitter feed, no Facebook interaction, just a boring set of listings.

Sure, the category-killer domain is Pizza.com, but the category-killer site isn’t here, instead it’s just a simple site with very little “flavor” to it. This just goes to show that in the new web, or as I like to call it Web 3.0 – you need to do more than put-up a basic site even if you do own the category-defining name, you have to build a brand. If you take a look at the big three they all have made real living breathing brands online. Dominos is active on Twitter and Facebook and using these tools to interact with customers and make the brand, well, exactly that, a brand!

Right now it looks like the Twitter feed is becoming a bit of a complaint department but they are interacting with their customers and showing them that they’re listening. The site is fresh and easy to navigate, it is winning in the web 3.0 economy.

So remember, as Domainers owning a category-defining name like Pizza.com means much more than throwing-up a simple directory script and expecting to collect the big bucks, it’s all about creating brands that interact with people and make your service the go-to, category defining site it was meant to be. Otherwise, even a great domain name like Pizza.com still won’t get you a good location in the search engines and that means you are missing the boat when it comes to, well, boatloads of traffic.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton