I woke up this morning and decided that I want to buy a lawn implement so I went to Google and searched for “lawn implements”. I got these results:
How do I know which site is the one I want? There are a couple of clues (we’ll talk about metatags another day), but one is definitely the domain name. I don’t think that freepatentsonline.com will sell lawn implements. But gardencom.com and crosby-equipment.com are worth investigating.
That decision happened in a split second, and it’s not very accurate. Always keep in mind that the internet is a place of snap judgements, and you want your domain name to encourage the right people to think they’ve come to the right place.
How do you do that?
Make the right impression with your domain name
If you’re Amazon or Google or Yahoo or flickr you can invent or repurpose a word and you’re so famous that people will remember it. But unless you’re them, it’s best to go with one of two choices:
Your company name
It’s simple, your existing customers will find it easy to remember, it makes your email more professional, and it builds brand awareness. If your company name is generic the domain name might well be already taken and you’ll have to improvise. Don’t go to such lengths to obtain a variant of the name that it becomes impossible to remember! It’s better to choose something completely different from your company name rather than xyzcorp-ltd-qld.com
Online companies will often have the company name the same as the domain name, which means two things:
- search for the name and all possible variants and make sure you’re going to be the dominant name in that space
- don’t order your stationary until you actually own the domain name
A description of your service, or better, the benefit.
When we were creating this site we chose beawesomeonline.com because the benefit we wanted to provide our customers was how to, well, be awesome online. We could have used weteachyouhowtobeawesomeonline.com which is wonderfully descriptive but way too long.
Tips for getting it right
- Try whenever possible not to use words with two possible spellings, or at least make sure that you register both domain names.
- Try really hard not to use words that many people don’t know how to spell correctly, either. I know it’s spelled “accomodation”, but I generally take two tries to get it right. No, damn, it’s “accommodation”. See?
- People won’t remember it if it’s too long. How long is too long? There’s no definite answer, but people can really only keep 7-ish bits of information in their mind at one time.
- You can only use letters, numbers and the hyphen.
- This isn’t the place to get wacky and creative. You want your domain name to be simple, credible and easy to remember.
Bonus cunning marketing trick!
You can have multiple domain names pointing to the same website, so you can cater to two or more related but separate markets with domain names like power-tools-for-her.com and power-tools-for-him.com
Does your domain name follow these guidelines? Tell us in the comments!