Is it bad to purchase a few "keyword search" urls that redirect to your site?

[franchisee]

Hi. Short Background.
We own a franchise and have limited control of our website.
We can post photos with keyword-rich descriptions and also an "about us" section,
but that's about it.
We're involved in a lot of social media on our own as well. (the corp. site also does their own)

My question is does purchasing a url that relates to keyword local search for our biz help, hinder, or neither?
i.e. if we are an (this is not us, but) electrician in columbus, would purchasing columbus-electrician.com or the like and then having that url redirect to our url be bad?

Thanks!

[joshz]

If there's no history on the domain then there's no benefit that can't be done by a half decent link.

[franchisee]

Thanks for your reply!
Just want to clarify what you're saying.
"no history on the domain" (the new url?)
"no benefit that CAN'T" -- so what you're saying is that doing this won't help with search rankings?
(auto redirecting (sorry, don't know the proper terms) the new url to our current site that's been around for 8 years?

[joshz]

I'm saying that buying a new domain with your keywords is worthless.
The benefit you get from your keyword in domain can be offset by ONE quality links.

Unless the domain has history, links, trust, etc. it's worthless. Eg, a new domain will not help anything.