Picking the right domain name for your company is almost as important as picking your company name. Take your time to choose the right one – remember this will be your web identity and will need to represent your company correctly as well as be easily found by a prospected customer.
Obviously, your first choice would be to have your company name as the domain, but this isn’t always possible. For example, although we now have the domain givethedogabone.com, for a number of years this wasn’t possible and we had to settle on various other domains such as gtdab.com. This wasn’t ideal for us, but after some careful thought this was the best option for us as a short term solution.
I hope the tips below will help you when select the right domain name for your company:
Easy to spell
Some people fall into the trap of picking a domain following the latest trends. You may think it is ‘trendy’ at the moment but using a cool and unique spelling is not the way forward. If your chosen domain is not spelt in the correct way and has a quirky twist, visitors could struggle to type it correctly and never even arrive at your website.
Use Keywords
If you are unable to have your company name as your domain name, try using keywords instead. For example if you are a kitchen fitter, registering ‘kitchenfitter.com’ would be ideal. Using keywords in a domain can also help with search engine rankings which in turn will increase traffic to your website.
Location
If the initial domain you are looking for has gone, sometimes it can be effective to add a location to the end – this will make it easier for potential customers to differentiate your company from others with the same name in another town or city and at the same time help with your search engine rankings.
Make your domain unique
Where possible ensure your domain isn’t similar to a popular established website. This can cause problems for people mistyping your domain. Once a domain is mistyped a search engine could suggest that they were actually looking for another website rather than yours – once this has happened you may have lost a visitor.
Easy to remember
There are millions of domains out there, so ensuring that your domain is memorable is a huge part of getting traffic to your website. There are many companies out there with great looking websites but if nobody can remember what it’s called this really doesn’t matter.
Short and simple
Keeping your domain as short as possible is a must. This way people will be able to firstly remember it, secondly type it in to their address bar without making mistakes. But also, shorter domains fit better when it comes to promotional material.
Reject Hyphens and Numbers
Using hyphens and numbers is generally a big no no. With numbers, people can be confused whether is should be spelt out or just appear as a simple numerical value. Hyphens will naturally make the domain longer and harder to remember.
Extensions
There are many fancy extensions to pick from for your domain these days. But people will still presume that your domain will end with ‘.com’ (or .co.uk – if UK based). So if possible, we would advise that you always try to snap up these domains as your first choice, if these are not available you could try a ‘.net’ or ‘.org’ but anything else comes under the hard to remember category.
Protecting your brand
Although, I’d suggest buying one of the more established extensions as mentioned above. You may want to protect your brand by purchasing other less popular extensions. After all, the last thing you would want, would be for a competitor to snaffle these domains and begin to actively promote their company with them.
Research
Always research a domain before purchasing it. Have a quick browse on your preferred search engine to see if a competitor has a similar domain or whether it is trademarked or copyrighted. Checking this at the start could avoid legal issues or losing your domain.
If you would like some help picking the perfect domain name for your company, please get in touch and and our team will be happy to help.