MacDonald on Marketing

Planning your small business website?  Choosing your site’s domain name is one of the most important decisions you will make.  You’ll want to get this right the first time around, because your domain name will be the foundation of much of your online marketing.

Here are eight tips to help you through the process:

1.  Always choose a .com domain name. People assume that your domain will end in .com, so if you choose a .net website you may end up sending your customers to your competitor.  The only exception to this rule is if you exclusively do business in a country other than the United States.  In that case, your country-specific domain (e.g. example.co.uk or example.ca) would be better.

2.  Your domain name should contain your brand or business name, especially if you have a bricks and mortar business.  This will make your domain name more memorable, and also reinforce your branding.

3.  Keywords in your domain name can really boost your eventual search engine rankings for those keywords.  If you have a short business or brand name, consider adding a keyword to the domain as well.  For example, GreenPointHats.com instead of just GreenPoint.com.

4.  Forget about hyphens. Hyphens confuse your customers and they will end up typing in the non-hyphenated domain name instead.  Choose MyGreatWebsite.com instead of My-Great-Website.com.

5.  Shorter is better, but shorter is not everything.  Try to keep the domain three words or less if possible.

6.  Make sure that your domain name is spelled like it sounds, without any possible ambiguity.  Watch out for words that sound the same or words that are tricky to spell.

7.  Register your domain with a reputable registrar. I always recommend GoDaddy.com for domain registration (but not webhosting).

8.  Register your domain name for at least several years at a time. Domains that have a long registration period tend to end up with higher search engine rankings in Google.  Make sure you keep your email address, phone number, and mailing address up to date with the domain registrar.  Your registrar must be able to contact you for rebilling when your domain name registration expires!

Stumped?  Nameboy.com and Bustaname.com are a couple of fun tools that can help you find available domains.

How did you choose your small business domain name?  Please share your experiences and ideas in the  comments below!

Photo credit:  Chrstopher