The popularity of your business website is highly affected by the domain name you have given it; that is a fact. If you happen to choose a domain name that is hard to spell or is a little on the longer side, you might have to struggle a bit until you get a decent flow of traffic – especially if you haven’t become a market brand yet.
But let’s not jump the gun just yet.
Below, we will have a look at a few tips that can help you search for, and choose, the perfect domain name for your business website – irrespective of the fact that your business name consists of a jumble of alphabets and even numerals (not recommended).
Narrow It Down
Searching for your perfect domain name can be a pain – so don’t do it manually. Go online and search for it using domain name generators and domain name selection tools. They will make your search go faster and easily.
While searching for a domain name you should consider whether you want the name for branding or if you prefer search-ability.
Branding
If you are in the shoe sale business, in downtown Chicago let’s say, you would be at an advantage if you could find a domain main name that suggested this rather than simply ACMEShoes.com – unless you have an already established brand name. In that case, you will have to do everything to get your hands on the domain name, even if you have to sue somebody (usually domain squatters) for copyright infringements. This is also a point you yourself should consider: do your research so you don’t take someone else’s name and end up in court.
Otherwise, you can rest assured that you will not be able to get your hands on generic domain names like shoes.com or shoesales.com – these are premium sites and even if their owners were willing to part with them, you’ll still have to pay through the nose to own them.
Search-ability
This is when you seek a domain name that can easily be found by people searching for your product and/or service. In this case, narrow it down by drilling into more details, look for ChicagoShoeSales.com, for example. This way, people specifically looking for “Chicago shoe sales” will be lead to your site since all the keywords are already in your domain name (of course, you will still need to do some serious SEO).
Make It Stick
While you’re out there searching for the perfect combination of words, don’t forget to look for those that are hard to forget. ChicagoShoeSales.com and ShoeSalesChicago.com are more memorable than SalesChicagoShoes.com or ShoesChicagoSales.com.
Try to follow the normal English sentence syntax and you will make it easier for you clients to remember your domain name. Another way to make it stick is to make the domain name as short as possible. While ChicagoShoeSales.com is just right, you could be going way overboard with a domain name like DowntownChicagoRealShoesSalesAndDiscounts.com – it’s just too much.
Avoid Figures And Characters
James Bond might get away with the 007 brand but very few others can pull numbers in their names. ChicagoShoeSales1145.com will soon be forgotten. Our minds aren’t wired to remember numbers, especially not the digits that are included in domain names.
Another mistake would be to add special characters like a hyphen. Chicago-Shoe-Sales.com can be a bit distracting and, again, misleading.
Choose The Correct Extension
If you are in business, you will do well to opt for a .com extension as opposed to an .org or .net one. That isn’t just because it is the most common used domain extension, but also because it is the one people would expect a business to have, as opposed to an organization or online platform.
In case you can’t get your hands on a .com extension, don’t settle for the other ones just because they are available (but you might want to buy them to protect your brand name, as we will see later). There are many new extensions that have recently been introduced that include the likes of .space, .dentist, .music etc. A good fit for our example would be ChicagoShoeSales.shoes.
And then there is the matter of country-specific domain names like .uk, .eu, .fr and .jp – if you think it is important that your brand, product or service be associated with a specific country, you should choose an extension that reflects it.
Protect Your Domain Name
After going through all the process of finding and buying your domain name, you would think the job is done. Unfortunately, that’s not true.
You should know that there are people out there (like the domain name squatters mentions earlier) who make a living by hijacking other people’s domain names. They will use your brand or domain name’s popularity to make money through ad clicks, views or by simply holding your site hostage and blackmailing you.
Therefore, whenever you can, try to buy as many of the other domain extensions for your domain name as you can. To be on the safe side, throw in misspellings of the name too.
