Choosing the right domain name to help your business grow

When you first start a website, this is your opportunity to create both a name and a brand that people will remember and be able to find. This is becoming a little more difficult now, since virtually every business has a website, yet domain names are just as important as ever so it’s sensible to choose wisely.

Here are a few tips.

It does what it says on the tin

If your domain name makes it very clear what your business does, it will be easier to get search traffic and people will remember it. AutoTrader.com is a great example. If you’d never heard of that but saw it written down, you would be able to take a good guess that it was for buying and selling vehicles.

An easy way to come up with a name is to write down all the keywords that apply to your business, remembering to include synonyms that may be a little less obvious. Going back to Autotrader, many car businesses would have listed the words “car sales” but perhaps not looked outside the box to change “car” to “auto” and “sales” to “trader”.

Less is more

Domain names that use several long or difficult to spell words aren’t catchy or memorable. Worse still, they will lose traffic because people remember the site name but spell it wrong and give up trying to find it.

Buy the .com

It’s important to think big in business so it’s always best to go for a site where the .com domain is available. For people who aren’t all that internet savvy, it’s easy to assume that a domain will be .com. Even for people who know that these things exist, it would be a big effort to go searching the .co.uk, .org and .net domains to find your site.

Be unique

You may well be modelling yourself on a successful competitor but don’t take this too far. If you call your domain the same as theirs with one letter different or a misspelling, it is obvious that you don’t have your own ideas. Worse still, you could end up with somebody taking legal action against you if you infringe on their copyright.