How To Choose The Right Domain Name For Your Business

The choice of the right domain for your business is all about branding. Branding right is definitely one of the most difficult tasks a new business is called to deal with. The brand is the face of the business to the world, the way it presents itself to its customers. The right brand is able to create recognition and showcase the true character and the soul of a company.

A brand is based on a few things – a name to start, then a logo, sometimes a symbol, certainly the colors, the tones, and maybe a tagline. All these factors must be used consistently and efficiently across all of the different communication channels – communication channels that ever evolve, expand and multiply, generating always new branding challenges. The company message must be delivered with efficacy in various media types like videos, images, or audio and on different screen sizes and new virtual environments.

All that makes the choice of the right presentation of a brand long and complicated. It needs testing on multiple levels to evaluate if and when the smallest variations are effective in closing the gap between a company and its audience.

Choosing a company name goes hand in hand with choosing a domain name. It is nothing more than the company identity on the web. There are a few common sense rules that you might want to follow when selecting the right domain.

1. Choose the .com extension for your domain. Generally speaking, your customer expects you to be on .com for several reasons. The right .com domain will make you look professional and it will create trust. Even if your business is very country-specific and you could well sit on a .co.uk or a .de, nevertheless some of your visitors will go to the .com just because they are used to it and therefore you will lose important traffic.

2. Choose a name that is uncomplicated and easy to type. Avoid weird spelling. You just do not want that your customers fail to input the right characters on their keyboard when looking for your business.

3. Better if it is short. The longer it is, the more likely your customers will make errors when typing. Moreover shorter it is, the easier to remember it will be.

4. Better if your domain passes the “radio test”. Basically think of listeners who hear your domain on the radio. Would they be able to spell it properly? Imagine a domain like cwater.com, is it “c”water or “see”water or maybe “sea”water? Call a few friends and tell them what domain you want to buy. Ask them to spell it back to you and verify that, at least most of the time, they can do it right.

5. Better if your domain does not include numbers. A “3” can be a “three” and the other way around, so why you should want to confuse your visitors?

6. You have basically 4 choices for your domain.
a) Pure brandable. These are completely invented names with a certain degree of memorability, like gezol.com, a lively, short name extremely easy to remember and type.
b) Derivative brandable. These have their root in real words that are chosen to give an immediate idea of what your business is about, like fixami.com a friendly name starting with “fix”.
c) Keyword brandable. These are combinations of words that have an evocative power and arouse feelings like strongvictory.com, concepts like universalpropulsion.com, or values like rightmission.com.
d) Exact Match Domains, also known as EMDs. These are combinations of keywords that describe as fully as possible, the products you sell or the services you offer, like plumbingservices.com, the perfect name if you offer plumbing services exactly.

The use of the right brandable makes the domain very memorable and easy to promote offline too. On the other hand, using EMDs will help to some extent in ranking on search engines for those keywords, letting people find you online more easily when they search for your products or services.

7. Names of colors, names of animals, and commonly used adjectives in your domain are good. They have a strong visual appeal and are extremely easy to pass to an audience and for the audience to remember.

Follow these simple rules when selecting your domain, and you will definitely be a step forward in creating a successful business venture.

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