Taking your business to the online world is an exciting time for anybody. You want to make the best statement you can by choosing a domain name or URL that describes your business perfectly. But, making domain names can be tricky for a newbie. So, to help you out, our Orange County SEO experts have come up with a list of eleven things you need to remember when picking out possible domain names.
1. You Need to Take Care of Your Domain Name
And by that, we mean you have to make regular payments on it! If you don’t, then ownership of the domain will be forfeited, and it’ll be up for grabs again.
In fact, this is how many websites get backlinks. They find websites that had been backlinked but haven’t been maintained since. They replace the broken domain name with a new website with the same domain name.
In essence, you don’t own any domain name—you’re just renting it out indefinitely. It can be pulled out anytime if you miss payments.
2. Domain and Business Names Don’t Have to Match
It makes sense for you to have a domain name that matches your business name, right? However, this isn’t always the case. Businesses that are well-established and recognized by a certain name are encouraged to keep the same domain name even if they’ve been sold to another company or have been rebranded.
One example of this is Google. In 2015, Google was restructured and made to be a company under the multinational conglomerate, Alphabet Inc, but Google keeps the same domain name anyway. That’s because changing it to Alphabet would only be an unnecessary hassle for both the customers and the developers!
3. Make Your Domain Obvious with Keywords
If you’re an up-and-coming business, chances are, you’re not that well-recognized yet. Potential customers should have at least an inkling as to what your products or services are. For example, if you’re a company of Orange County SEO experts, then you should have words like ‘media’ or ‘marketing’ in your domain.
Having keywords can also be useful since there are many similar-sounding company names these days. You want to make sure your customers are clicking the right URL.
4. Domain Names Should Not Be Too Long
Keep it short and sweet. Domain names should never be more than three words because it’s a hassle to type out. It’s also very easy to misspell and just not very nice to look at.
5. You Need to Bring Up Positive Feelings
Like colors and logos, domain names should preferably invoke emotions in your customers. This makes them more inviting and alluring. For example, you can use ‘boutique’ or ‘rose’ to showcase femininity, or ‘extravaganza’ and ‘sale’ to emphasize great value for the money.
6. No Hyphens, Please
For some odd reason, people tend to distrust hyphens. That’s why you don’t often see hyphenated websites around. They seem a bit tacky and cheap, and they are usually associated with spammy websites.
Not only that, but they are easy to misspell too! The URL awesome-website.com would probably be typed out as awesomewebsite.com most of the time because people just aren’t used to using hyphens.
7. Think About Possible Misspells
If you have the budget for it, we highly encourage you to register multiple domain names that lead to one website. This way, customers will still end up on the right landing page even with a misspelled URL.
For example, even if you type out Googl, Google’s homepage will still come up because Google has bought the rights for Googl.
8. Safeguard Other Domains
Speaking of domain variants, you should safeguard other domains just in case someone tries to steal your brand or make a knock-off of it. For example, if you sell glitter nail polish and your URL is glitterpolish.com, you should also get polishglitter.com, glitterpolishes.com, glitternailpolish.com, and other similar-sounding variants.
9. Your Website Should End in (.com)
There are several ways of ending a URL but (.com) is the most common. A lot of us end up using (.com) just because we’re used to it. So, if the (.com) version of your desired domain name is taken but (.net) and (.org) aren’t, it’s not worth your time. Chances are, more people are going to type in the (.com) version habitually.
10. Use Country-Specific Domains
If you’re only targeting people living within a specific country, it would be a good idea to get a country code top-level domain (ccTLD). With this, you can add an extra tidbit at the end to show you are based in that country. For example, websites based in the UK get .uk, while websites based in Mexico get .mx.
Having a ccTLD is helpful because you can boost your local SEO and decrease competition with bigger, international businesses.
11. Do a Background Search on Domains
Remember when we told you that some domains could die because owners forgot to pay for them? Well, some domains can also die because the owners got caught doing something sketchy. They could have gotten in big trouble with Google and had to abandon ship because maintaining the website wasn’t worth it anymore.
So, if you resurrect one of these criminal websites, you might get penalized for it even if you didn’t do anything. Some punishments are just too severe and carry on even with new owners. So, to prevent this from happening, visit archive.org and see if there’s anything bad about your desired domain name.
Conclusion
I bet you weren’t expecting just how much work came into making a domain name!
We hope you’ve enjoyed our guide to making the best domain name for your business. We wish you luck with your endeavors, and if you need any help at any point in your journey, feel free to give us a nudge. Drive Traffic Media is a digital marketing agency in Orange County that can be called at (949) 800-6990.
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