How to Choose a Domain Name for a Small Business
I have noticed two extreme schools of thought about choosing a domain name (URL) for your website:
- School of thought #1: According to this theory, it doesn’t really matter what your website’s URL is. Pick anything. You’re going to get most of your traffic from Google, paid search ads, or from customers who find your URL on your business card, brochure, or yellow pages ad, anyway. Or so the theory goes.
- School of thought #2: Your choice of domain name is a crucial issue and you must not make any dumb moves or your business will fail faster than you can say “Go Daddy.” Under this theory, your domain name must be some common word that is highly coveted, memorable, very short, etc. You are probably going to have to buy it from someone who already owns it, because we all know the good URLs are taken.
OK, these are extreme views.
For a small business I think the choice of domain name falls somewhere in between the above two extremes.
Your choice of domain name does, in fact, matter. However, it doesn’t matter so much that you have to spend a million dollars (you know what million I’m talking about — that million you haven’t even made yet).
By following some simple guidelines you can choose a serviceable domain name that will further your small business and probably cost you under $10 a year. I wrote about the subject of choosing a domain name in my Inc Technology column this month.
Read: 10 Tips for Choosing a Domain Name.
After you read the 10 tips, leave a comment telling us how you chose your domain name. Would you choose the same URL if you had to do it over?
July 24th, 2007 at 9:18 am
you can see some more resource on same topic here as well. http://www.theerce.com/blog/?s=domain+name
July 24th, 2007 at 10:44 am
The advice there is very hit and miss. The author falls at the first with the recommendation to “make it a dot-com”, which is exact opposite of what you should be doing with regional websites. 2, 3, 4 and 5 are ok, but misspellings and other extentions? That’s only for the hardcore. The recommendation of a .mobi registration is laughable - you might as well register a .biz or .eu for all the good it’ll do you - and the hyphenated recommendation is just plain wrong. By my reckoning it should be “4 tips, maybe 4 and a half”.
adam
July 24th, 2007 at 11:03 am
[…] How to Choose a Domain Name for a Small BusinessSchool of thought #2: Your choice of domain name is a crucial issue and you must not make any dumb moves or your business will fail faster than you can say “Go Daddy.” Under this theory, your domain name must be some common word that is … […]
July 24th, 2007 at 11:25 am
I chose my domain name based on two ideas. I wanted it to be brandable, which it is, and I wanted it to contain keywords, which it does! I’m happy with what I got! http://www.theyoungcapitalist.com
July 24th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
I chose my domain name as a bit of both - keyword and branding. Regarding misspellings and other extentions, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stumbled onto the wrong site as a result of this and wondered around for a while until I noticed it wasn’t even the intended site I was looking for. It’s aggravating and it’s also an attempt at a bit of deceit in my opinion.
On the other hand, I have also been taken directly to the correct site when misspelling the name. One example of this is Auctiva. If you type it in misspelled - as Octiva - it automatically redirects you to the correct site - Auctiva - very smart.
As far as .mobi URL’s go “. . .as mobile usage grows you may be glad you have that domain in two or three years.” Couldn’t agree with you more there. May be “prime real estate” in the very near future. . .
July 24th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
I’ve seen many startups struggle with this issue. It’s a tough one.
I’ve developed a simple (free) tool to try and “grade” the quality of a keyword-rich domain name. I encourage readers to try it out:
http://www.DomainGrader.com
It’s crude, but might prove useful.
Note: It does not make domain suggestions, but helps you try and ascertain the quality of a domain name that you are considering registering or buying.
July 25th, 2007 at 6:44 am
For what it’s worth, my experience with timberry.com and paloalto.com and bplans.com and the other 100 or so names we own at Palo Alto Software pretty much confirms most of your 1p tips.
I was lucky in one thing, which was that I got onto the web relatively early (January 1995) and registered a bunch of names including bplans, bizplans, mplans, timberry.com, and others. I registered those of my 5 kids’ names that were available then too; they’re adults now and they are grateful. For Palo Alto Software I registered “pasware,” “palo-alto.com”, and “paloaltosoftware.com,” because “paloalto.com” was already registered.
We bought “paloalto.com” a few years later and we’re glad we did. We also bought “bplan.com” after we’d been successful with “bplans.com” just to protect for mispelling, and we kept bplans.org and bplans.net as well. We registered paloalto.co.uk when we opened a susbsidiary in the UK, and we bought bplans.co.uk later. We bought “businessplanning.com” later.
As I look at domain names now, after 12 years of it, I fall somewhere between your two rules. It seems to me that if you have something short, hard to misspell, and easy to remember, you can build a business on it. Amazon.com, Digg, google, for example, are names that were made, not directly related with the business. We were very late to the photo sharing world with “amiglia.com” but it is fits the specifically family tree oriented photo sharing site quite well, so the name works quite well for one that started in 2006. On the other hand, Five years ago I reviewed a business plan for a site named “photo.com” that called that a natural domain name that would supposedly make the business successful without marketing. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now.
I’d also point out that I do see people stressing the name too much sometimes, not moving forward with their plans because it has to be perfect. I don’t think perfect is required, just as long as it isn’t terrible.
Thanks Anita for an interesting post.
Tim
July 25th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Very useful information.
July 25th, 2007 at 9:42 am
My first domain name was chosen because it is my business name, kiskivalleykandles.com. Recently I switched it to kiskivalleycandles.com. Changing that one letter, k to c, has improved my search rankings. I was naive to think that people searching for candles would still find me.
I agree with Chris that .mobi may be really beneficial in the future. Thanks for the 10 great tips.
July 25th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Thanks for sharing your domain grader tool, Dharmesh.
I’m not sure I fully understand how the tool works — but it was a lot of fun using it.
Anita
July 26th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
This is sage advice, Anita!
We have seen SO many web addresses that are hard to remember, hard to type, not a dot com, etc. Thanks for finally putting the real deal out there.
I hope some of the thousands (millions?) of “web designers” out there who give their clients lousy advice will read your post, and your excellent “Ten Tips.”
Any business beginning or improving a web presence take head!