How much time and effort were involved when you picked your brand name? Choosing a domain name for your business requires the same amount of consideration. And if you already own a unique brand name, you can quickly get a domain name identical to your business name. It takes care of half of your journey.
In order to choose a perfect domain name for your business, you have to consider a few crucial things, such as pronunciations, credibility, and keywords. With our eight crucial tips, we’ll guide you through the process of selecting a domain name.
Page Contents
- 1. Choose the Right Top Level Domain Extension:
- 2. Give Preference to your brand Name:
- 3. Make a list of Alternative Domain Names for your Business
- 4. Pick a Keyword Specific Domain Name:
- 5. Choose a domain name geared toward business growth:
- 6. Pick a Catchy, Short, and Professional domain name:
- 7. Focus on Domain History Research:
- 8. Things to Avoid when Picking a Domain Name:
- Conclusion
1. Choose the Right Top Level Domain Extension:
TLD is short for Top-Level Domain Extension. It is the last part of your Domain Name.
Consider our domain name:
Here, .com is the Top-Level Domain Extension. It is also the most commonly used domain extension. People tend to have more faith in websites with .com extensions.
Other popular top level domain extensions include: .org, .net, and .info.
While these are the basic top-level domains, you can visit the Domain.com TLD list to find other top-level domains.
Most of these top-level domain names are newly established.
Now, if you run an academy or coaching institute, you could use the .academy domain extension. But when you do that, you risk losing the .com advantages.
Although many people will use a link to reach your website, others will type in your name. Most of them will type in a .com instead of .academy. If you don’t own a .com extension for your domain name, then your traffic will be redirected to others who own it (a .com domain name).
That doesn’t mean you cannot purchase extra domain name extensions. It helps cover all the bases.
2. Give Preference to your brand Name:
Ideally, businesses tend to stick to their brand names while choosing a domain. It is a best practice to find the perfect domain name for one’s business. It also adds more authenticity and credibility to your business. And for these reasons, you’ll need to check if a domain with your brand name is available.
When Domain Name is Available:
We have a business with the name: Snack in Seconds
Note: We have purposefully used a unique name in order to find the exact domain match for the business name.
So, we used Bluehost to find the domain with this name.
After hitting the Search button, we got the following the result:
The domain name is available with the desired domain extension.
When Domain Name is not Available:
Suppose a laptop repair shop names itself Smart Infotech.
When you google Smart infotech, many businesses with similar names pop up on the list. It increases the chances of domain names being taken.
Let’s try another domain name search with Bluehost.
Look at the result below: It clearly states that the domain name is unavailable.
What do you do when your brand name isn’t available? Find out with our next tip
3. Make a list of Alternative Domain Names for your Business
When your brand name isn’t available, you can start making a list of alternatives. A domain name generator can prove helpful in coming up with alternative domain names that don’t stray too far from your business’s name.
We’ll use GoDaddy’s Domain Name Generator to find alternatives for Smart Infotech:
With GoDaddy , you get a more detailed understanding of why the domain name is unavailable.
In the image shown above, we can see that smartinfotech.com is a premium domain with a very steep price. You have to scroll down to find affordable alternatives. Most alternatives come with different extensions. We were able to narrow down two relevant .com domain names. One adds s to the end of the brand name, and the other adds the word online.
Other alternative suggestions for domain names include adding prefixes such as The, Your, or My. Let’s see how that works.
TheSmartInfotech.com
YourSmartInfotech.com
4. Pick a Keyword Specific Domain Name:
Keywords lie at the heart of a Good SEO strategy. Google Search results have become very competitive. And it has become difficult to rank your website on google without SEO. You should consider hiring an SEO expert to help your website succeed on search engines.
One of their key responsibilities is keyword research. Finding niche specific keywords that your website can rank for. With their help, you can find a way to incorporate a keyword into your domain name.
For example: Let’s consider the keyword flower shop. This one is pretty simple. Adding the keyword to the shop name will help you find a keyword specific domain.
We’ll consider the Lavish flower shop as the business name.
We used Hostgator to find a top-level domain for the business, and it is available.
Example 2: Another example would be Snacks corner. It is a popular keyword within the fast-food industry.
We’ll look for a domain for the business: Suvidha Snacks Corner
As you can see, it is easier to find the domain names when you have unique business names.
Adding such keywords to your domain name makes it memorable. All your visitors have to remember is the Lavish or Suvidha, and the rest will come easily.
5. Choose a domain name geared toward business growth:
Every business owner strives to grow their business. In order to continuously grow, businesses have to update themselves to the latest industry trends and standards. They have to stay relevant. Business websites also undergo extreme makeovers to keep up with the exacting standards. However, one can’t change their domain name to fit the new scope of their business.
Changing a domain name means losing all the hard work on it. You’ll have to shell out more money to maintain both domains until all your visitors get the memo about the new domain name. This can be successfully achieved but takes a lot of time and effort.
Instead of changing domain names in the feature, why not think ahead and pick a flexible domain name that could encompass all your future services and products. With the way technology continues to grow, one can’t predict the future. But properly analyzing the available statistics and data can help you figure out a course for the future.
For example: let’s go back to our previous example: Smart Infotech.
Infotech is short for information technology. Businesses with Infotech in their name can start as an IT firm that offers software solutions. In future, even if they expand their business to other IT services, including hardware, the domain thesmartinfotech.com would still remain relevant. This is how a flexible domain works for your business.
6. Pick a Catchy, Short, and Professional domain name:
Catchy Domain Name
Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Meta all rank in the top 10 largest companies in the world.
Apart from all being well-established and popular in their field, each of these has at least one thing in common. They have a memorable brand name that translates well into their domain.
- apple.com
- microsoft.com
- amazon.com
- google.com
- meta.com
All five of these are short, memorable, and catchy. They all have the top-level .com domain extension, which also makes it easily accessible.
While selecting a domain name, you have to make sure that it is catchy. People should remember it and type it in the address bar from their memory. For the same reason, you also have to keep it short.
Short and Professional Domain Name:
Let’s compare examples of lengthy and short domain names.
a) JackAndJillMumbaiHighSchoolLibrary.com
vs.
b) JackAndJillLibrary.com
Although to some, the first alternative (a) might look memorable, it is quite lengthy, and people can mistakenly type the wrong spelling.
Instead of going into all those details, keep it short and simple like the second alternative (b).
Similar to your brand name, domain names hold a world of power over your business reputation. It represents you in the digital world. So, when you are picking your domain name, ensure that it is befitting of your business’s stature.
Another thing to consider is the pronunciation of the word. Word-of-the-mouth marketing is an effective tool powered by the proper pronunciation of words. Run a pronunciation test. See how it sounds out loud before you finalize a domain name. Even if someone recommends your brand, people might not understand it. And their societal rules stop them from asking you to repeat the pronunciation again and again.
The point is, it shouldn’t be that hard to understand.
7. Focus on Domain History Research:
Before purchasing the domain name, run a final history check on the domain. You can use backlink checker tools to check whether the domain was connected to authority or spammy websites. If it already has tons of backlinks, it could increase the authority of your site. However, if it has spammy links, then it might lower your website authority.
You could either move on to an alternative domain name or try to fix the issues of this domain name. If you find a few spammy links, you can contact the admin of that website and ask them to remove the link. If that doesn’t work, then you can disavow the link on your website. Google will then understand that you do not want to be associated with that particular website.
To show you how backlink checkers work, we tested Wikipedia.org using Similarweb’s free backlink checker tool:
Using this is very simple. You just have to input the domain name with the extension and then hit the search button. You can also pick from the drop-down list to speed up the process.
It provides you with a detailed breakdown of the website built on the domain name. It includes a quick overview, rankings, traffic and engagement, competitor information, backlink information, and more.
Referring Websites for Wikipedia:
8. Things to Avoid when Picking a Domain Name:
Incorrect spellings:
When the desired domain name isn’t available, you might be tempted to change the spelling a bit to get a similar domain name. That idea rarely works as it should. CHances are the two domains might even have similar pronunciations. And in your desire to get a close match to the domain name, you could end up sending all your traffic to the original domain name with the correct spelling.
Hyphens:
The need to pick a Creative domain name might have you considering adding special characters such as hyphens to your domain name. We recommend against it. Saying it out loud can be easy, but sharing it with people can be difficult. People might not comprehend the domain name. Even if you mention the hyphen, people would simply type in the full domain. It would not benefit your business.
Acronyms:
Avoid using Acronyms. As a fledgling digital presence, you have a long way to go before people start recognizing you with a business acronym. For example, Facebook is also referred to as FB in most social circles. But to reach there, you’ll have to spread awareness about the brand. If you already have an established business with an acronym, that could be an exception.
Other things to avoid include doubled letters in the domain name, the use of confusing words, and using trademarked brand names. The last one could get you sued.
Conclusion
Choosing the right domain matters. On the internet, it is your business’s identity which reflects on your reputation. When you start a business, you have everything in order, from the documents required to a sound business plan. This guide presents you with a plan to choose the perfect domain name for your business.
Bluehost, Bigrock, Hostgator, and GoDaddy are a few reputed domain registrars where you can find the right domain name for your business. Before you make a purchase, consider what kind of hosting your business might need. Typically, when you get a premium hosting plan for these service providers, you will also get a free domain for a year. It helps you save on the domain name for a year, which should be sufficient when you are starting.
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