The simple answer is no with a but… The full answer is a bit more complicated so here we go…

Most people use search engines to find websites rather than typing in a web address on the hope of finding say ‘Accountants in Yorkshire’. So buying new domains  needs to effect your ranking if this is going to be worth it, you can’t expect to get much traffic from people just randomly entering a domain name these days.

You can have multiple domain names pointing at the same website so keeping with the accountancy example we could have a website on

www.accountantsinyorkshire.co.uk

and the same website on

www.yorkshireaccountants.co.uk

However, Google is smart and will know if the same content is available on more than one domain name. This is known as duplicate content and often indicates that you are trying to do something to skew the search engines. In some cases the only thing that happens is that your duplicate content (or website) doesn’t get listed on Google and only the ‘original’ (or older) content does get listed. In some cases the duplicate content is removed and the original content is subject to a Ranking Penalty for trying to skew the results.

So if you can’t use the same website across a number of domains then how about creating a new website on each domain and then linking this to the main website? This is a bit more complicated but you could setup a single webpage on say ‘accountantsinyorkshire.co.uk’ that is 100% focused on attracting visitors who type in ‘Accountants In Yorkshire’. This might be successful in some low competition keyphrases but if you are in a sector with plenty of competitors what you end up doing is splitting your promotional efforts across a number of different websites.

There are some circumstances where building a domain name for a specific keyphrase can be quite useful and thats when you are creating a ‘Landing page’ for use with Google Adwords. This PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising system uses a number of factors to create something called a ‘Quality Score’ which is used as a factor to calculate the pricing of your advertising. This quality score is simply a way of rewarding advertisers whose website closely matches their adverts.

So there could be some merit to buying up some applicable domain names for possible use in the future but I wouldn’t be too bothered – its likely that most of the good ones aren’t available anyway.

To answer your question I don’t see much benefit to buying up additional domain names as this will have little or no impact on your SERP (Search Engine Result Page) listings.

So what will? Here are the top 10 Positive Factors as agreed on www.seomoz.org (a well respected SEO website)

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Links
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page