Choosing a good domain name is a very important first step to owning a successful website.
Your domain name is how people find your website online - for example bills-fishing-supplies.co.uk is a domain name. Somebody types this in and they are taken to a Fishing Supplies website someone called Bill has set up - and chosen a very appropriate domain for!
But what constitutes good? In this article, we’ve compiled a top ten list of DO’s and DON’T’s when it comes to picking the perfect web address.
Top DO’s When Choosing A Domain
- DO think about words people are likely to type into search engines like Google when they are looking for a website like yours. If, like Bill, you are in the business of providing mail order fishing supplies to anglers in the South East, it might be more important to include the words “fishing” or “angling” in your domain than including more specific words such as “rods”, or “lures”. The logic here is that more people are likely to search for “fishing supplies” or “angling supplies” than they are for “rods and lures” when they’re looking to buy fishing equipment, and having these words included in your domain name will help boost your search engine rankings.
- DO think about how your domain will be used. Will you be telling many people about it over the phone, or will the vast majority of people coming to your website be finding it through search engines like Google? If you’re going to be saying it over the phone a lot, you might want to avoid using hyphens or numbers in your domain, as this can be confusing in conversation. For example, activ8-sports.co.uk might look clever and modern, but would be hard to explain how to type in the middle of a phone call - you would likely end up having to spell it out letter by letter, “a-c-t-i-v, then the number 8, then a hyphen…” and so on. This can get very tiring, both for you and your clients, and your snappy company name suddenly becomes a real drag.
- DO pick something relevant. It might seem obvious, but if Bill decided to ditch his fishing business and become a travelling circus performer instead, he might be tempted to re-use his old bills-fishing-supplies.co.uk domain for a new website advertising his juggling services. While it might save Bill a bit of cash in the short term, the completely irrelevant domain will confuse potential clients and end up costing Bill more money in lost business than it has saved him.
- DO think about whether or not to use hyphens in your domain name. Similarly with point 3, they can make things a bit confusing over the phone, but more importantly, some people can forget them if there are more than a couple, or if they’re not between every word. On the flipside, however, hyphens seperating words in your domain name can help with your search engine rankings, and they can make a domain much easier to read on an advertisement or business card - it’s easier for us to read two seperate words when there is a hyphen or space between them thaniftheyareallcrammeduptogether. See? Also, check out the second tip on the DON’Ts list for another very important tip that’s related to this.
- DO pick a relevant ending (eg .co.uk or .com) for your domain. If you are a business operating primarily with clients in the UK, a .co.uk ending would be a good choice here. On the other hand, if you’re dealing with clients all over the world, a .com ending would be better. Non-profit organisation may want to opt for a .org ending.
Top DON’T’s When Choosing A Domain
- DON’T pick something that’s hard to spell correctly. A lot of people could give up trying to correctly spell the domain necessary-requirements.co.uk - you should avoid choosing a domain like this.
- DON’T dilute your website and domain’s focus too much. If an entrepreneur (we’ll call him Steve) started a business running sporting days out, he might perhaps find that there is also an untapped market in the area for someone to hire out golf clubs. As any smart businessman would, Steve wants to seize this opportunity. However, rather than registering a domain like sporting-days-out-and-golf-club-hire.co.uk, Steve would be better off starting two websites - maybe one with the domain sporting-days-out.co.uk and another at golf-club-hire-st-albans.co.uk. These websites could happily link to one another, and be clearly affiliated, but would mean that consumers aren’t at risk of being confused about what exactly Steve’s companies do, and the services they provide. The other bonus here is that with seperate sites, each one is more likely to show up on search engine results for the relevant search terms.
- DON’T pick something that could be mis-read as something else. The best way to illustrate this might be by mentioning our favourite example: Who Represents are a company that provide contact details of celebrity PR agents, given the celebrity’s name. Their domain, however, is whorepresents.com, which might be misunderstood to be a website providing gifts for ladies of the night. This is very amusing on the one hand, but on the other could offend potential clients, and as a result drive away business.
- DON’T pick something that has the same letter repeated several times in a row. We’d normally say repeating the same letter 3 times is the absolute maximum, but for some letters even this can be confusing. With S’s it’s almost okay, for example successspeed.co.uk is a just-about-legible domain name that might be used by a racing team, but selllearning.co.uk might be really pushing it. In this case, the shape of the letter L means that it can be really difficult to discern how many of them are actually there.
- DON’T choose something that includes a trademark owned by another company. At the very least, the other company can have ownership of this domain taken away from you (and you won’t get your money back), but more seriously, this is basically trademark infringement, and therefore all the penalties and suchlike associated with that will also apply.
So there you have it - ten top tips for choosing a great domain name for your company’s website! Let us know how you get on in the comments section below, and good luck!
