Exact-match domains are not a shortcut.

What changed

In the era when term matching carried more weight, having the exact phrase in the domain was a genuine advantage, and an industry grew around registering them. The problem was that it worked regardless of whether the site behind the domain was any good, so results filled with keyword domains offering nothing.

Google shipped an update in 2012 aimed precisely at low-quality exact-match domains, and the advantage largely went. What remains is small: Google has described words in a URL as a very minor factor, and a keyword domain today mostly ranks on the same things as everything else. Any exact-match domain you see ranking well is ranking on its content and links, and would rank about as well under a different name.

What it costs you

You cannot build a brand on it. Brand and name searches are a genuinely valuable signal and a real business asset, and nobody develops loyalty to cheapplumberlondon. It is also awkward to say aloud, on a van, or in an email address.

It boxes in the business. The domain names one service in one city. Expanding to a second city, or moving upmarket from cheap, leaves you with a name arguing against your own positioning, and changing it later means a migration you would rather not do.

It can read as low quality. Both to people, who have learned what these domains usually are, and to journalists deciding whether to cite you, which quietly makes earning coverage harder.

It attracts the wrong company. Exact-match domains are heavily used by spam and lead-generation networks, so you are choosing to look like the neighbourhood you are trying to be distinguished from.

Where keywords in URLs do still help

Not the domain, the path. A URL like /services/boiler-repair/ is genuinely better than /p?id=8842, mostly because it is legible to a person deciding whether to click, readable as anchor text when someone pastes it, and clear about site structure. The gain is clarity rather than keyword matching, and it is available to any domain name.

The related trap is over-correcting: stuffing paths into /cheap-boiler-repair-london-emergency-service/ is the alt text mistake in another field. Short, descriptive, stable. And stable matters most, because changing URLs to add a keyword is a migration risk taken for a very small factor, which is almost never a trade worth making.

The general lesson

Tactics have expiry dates, and the ones that worked because they were exploitable are the first to be closed. The advice outlived the mechanism by more than a decade here, which is worth remembering whenever a rule arrives without a date attached.

Pick a domain you can build a business on. If it happens to contain a relevant word, fine, take the rounding error. Choosing a worse name for the business in order to collect it is optimising the wrong thing, in the same family as buying an expired domain for its age.