Why Aged Domains Beat Starting Over, Long-Tail SEO & AI Product Images with Todd Harmon

My name is Todd Harmon, and I am the founder and curator of AURA Modern Home.

I’ve been in e-commerce for about twenty years, so it’s been a long time. One of the first things we did was massage chairs, the three- to five-thousand-dollar chairs you see at Sharper Image. We built that up and sold it off, then we did memory foam mattresses, and then a company called Patio Productions, which is still alive and well. I sold that a few years ago, and I started AURA in November. As I transitioned out of Patio Productions, that was my creative direction. We were in the middle of a home remodel and we liked the dark and moody aesthetic, and that’s where AURA came to be.

AURA Modern Home sells bathroom vanities, as does our other website, Bath Gems. We owned Bath Gems about ten years ago, and at the time we were one of the number one selling bathroom vanity companies in the United States online. We moved away from it to focus on the patio furniture site, and during that time the site just sat dormant. I bought it back from my partners in July to relaunch it, because AURA was also selling vanities, so anything that goes up on AURA also goes up on Bath Gems.
When we sold vanities a long time ago, we had a brand I created called JWH Living, and we imported and designed all of our own bathroom vanities. Understanding how a quality vanity is made helps us sell vanities to customers.

For AURA Modern Home, yes, everything is dark luxury. On Bath Gems we also allow farmhouse style and white and bright products. And you said it: everybody goes the white route. We were in the middle of a home remodel. We have an upstairs and a downstairs, and the upstairs is its own unique space that we’d already taken lighter and brighter. Since the downstairs is a really distinct area, we wanted to do something different, so we were thinking about going darker, with color-drenched walls.
I’d just come into AURA at that time and was thinking about how we could create a niche in the furniture industry, so we blended the style we were thinking about for our downstairs with the business. I think it’s an interesting direction because, like you said, everybody’s doing white and bright. We’re doing dark luxury and moody, with a darker, curated feel.

Our theory has always been that we sell images, so having great images is very important. Not all of our products have unique images, but for most of the things that show up on the first page of a collection, we’ve added our own dark and moody images. Most of that is done with AI placing real products in scenes and photos. I’ve developed my own software to do it all. We can pull products straight from Shopify into the software, create the images, edit them in the software, sort of Photoshop-ish, and push them back into Shopify. We can also animate them in my software.

Our AI visibility is good compared to most of our competitors, because my background for the last twenty years is SEO. We have driven almost all traffic to all of our companies using mostly organic traffic. I know how to optimize an article, and our blog articles are highly optimized for Google.
We also use AI to create different software tools. You can create almost anything you can dream up in ChatGPT or Claude right now. You just have to be creative and have somewhat of a plan for what you want to do, tell it your goals, and through enough iteration you can design your own software.

Me being the face is important. You talked about earlier having trust, and I think having a single person as your brand rep helps create trust. It’s the same concept companies use with billboards. The more you see me, hear my voice, see my pictures, and read an article and see that it’s me, the more trust builds. Most of the customer service comes through me too. We use AI and Grok bots to do a lot of it, and I approve what’s being sent out, so it all goes through me to get approved. When you’re shopping on AURA, you’re shopping with me, not with any of the employees.

We have a couple of different ideal customer profiles. One is designers. About twenty percent of our orders come from design firms. They like the dark and moody, they love the website, and it’s exactly what they’re looking for for their clients, so those are pretty easy. The other ideal customer profile is typically female, thirty to fifty years of age, owns a home, higher income, and is looking to create a unique, curated space, typically in million-dollar homes.

From a dark and moody standpoint, we’re the only ones really doing that right now. You see Restoration Hardware dip its toe into that pool every once in a while. There’s a furniture company called Noir, which we carry, that is very much dark and moody as well. But we’re pretty unique in that aspect.
We also curate as we onboard brands. We don’t just take everything a brand gives us. If it’s a white box cabinet that doesn’t fit, or a coastal design, or something bamboo that looks kind of tiki, we don’t load everything into our store. There’s definitely a curated approach that goes into it.

Furniture, while really competitive online, is also the largest industry I could come up with. My background is in all kinds of furniture, including patio furniture, so it’s easy for me to go into it. Think about coffee tables. We were looking at them the other day, and from a search standpoint we use tools like Ahrefs to dig into the keywords. There’s so much depth in just a coffee table, because so many people are searching for round coffee tables, rectangular, black, wood, marble top, storage coffee tables, and it goes on and on.
Companies like Restoration Hardware and Arhaus aren’t trying to compete on round coffee tables or black round coffee tables or drum coffee tables. They have one collection called coffee tables. That lets me wiggle a foothold in and build these little collections curated to a specific search query.

AURA is in its first year, and we’re happy with the progress. It’s making sales every day, which is good for a first-year brand. Bath Gems launched in July, so we’re hoping to spin it up over the next six months and see it grow into what AURA is.
We’ve also niched out a couple of websites that we didn’t develop all the way. I gave coffee tables as an example earlier: we bought the exact-match domain roundcoffeetables.com and built out a quick WordPress site on it just so it could start getting indexed by Google. Google has what’s called the sandbox, and we’re getting through that with that site. I’ve also always owned the domain modernbathroomvanity.com, which I’ve had for about fifteen years, and we’ll probably spin that up in six months as well.

The number one thing is to buy a website that has been around for five to ten years. AURA Modern Home used to be owned by one of the people who sold our patio furniture a long time ago. I knew her. She started it during COVID, and once COVID was over she went back to work and it just sat there. She wanted to sell it at one point, and four or five years ago I was willing to pick it up and sit on it. I wasn’t using it, and it didn’t look anything like it does now. But having an aged domain is very important, because building backlinks and authority is really hard to replicate even in one year. It can take years to replicate the authority that Bath Gems or AURA has.
There are so many websites out there that nobody is using. You just have to contact those people and ask, “Can I buy your domain for five hundred dollars? Can I buy it for a thousand dollars?” depending on the authority, which I judge using Ahrefs.

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.