Does your domain name really matter?
Your domain name is the .co.uk, .com, .net, .org or some other dot something that people use to get to your web site. cobwebbery.co.uk is ours and that’s the one you’re using now. I’s important to buy a good, relevant domain name early on in the lifespan of your business because each year good domain names are becoming less freely available. A few years back a group of investors headed by Jake Weinbaum paid £3 million for the name business.com, aiming to make it a showcase B2B (Business-to-Business) site. According to their own press they have succeeded. Yes, it's a terrific name - short, sort of descriptive and easy to remember. The domain name does have a certain cachet, but is it £3 million worth? That cash could have bought a lot of publicity for whatever name they could have bought for a tenner.
We keep hearing that the reason these so-called generic or descriptive domain names are so valuable is that some people just type domain names into the address bar of their browser rather than using a search engine. This fact seems to be intuitively false. It seems hard to believe that someone looking for information on a particular business would type in www.business.com. Furthermore, of the top 50 websites listed on Alexa only one, match.com, is an easy-to-remember name that describes what the site is about.
The answer seems to be that rather than typing www.ebay.co.uk into the browser address bar a lot of people just Google “ebay” (having set Google as their home page) and then just click on one of the links that comes up in the list. We also know that Google will index your domain name alone, even if your actual web site is of relatively poor quality in search engine terms. These two facts must be giving you a big clue on how to choose a good domain name... If your business is called ‘John Smith and Son’ there is a natural human tendency to register johnsmith.co.uk or smithandson.co.uk, even if the business you’re in is selling barn dried logs. These domains will work well if you expect to be so well known that potential web visitors will search in google for ‘smith and son’ - but frankly, this isn’t very likely. If on the other hand you register ‘barndriedlogs.co.uk’ there’s a fair chance that Google will index your site under ‘barn dried logs’ AND that people searching for barn dried logs will Google using this phrase.
I would try to come up with my own name before I bought someone else's. Here are some tips:- Try to go with a .co.uk domain name if you are a UK based business serving the UK - it’s the one that most people in this country associate with the internet thanks to the BBC advertising their URL at the end of the news on most nights. If you are an international company, then it’s a good idea to use a .com. It's the name everyone in the USA (probably your biggest market) associates with the Internet. Any other Top Level Domain (TLD) like .org or .net is just going to confuse people, unless it sounds better than the .com. For example, if you are about networking or a network, a .net is more natural. A few years back an internet service provider called Claranet started up and used the domain name clara.net - brilliant! If your site is informational, you should use .info if it sounds okay. Hands down the most ingenious use of a TLD is del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site. The use of the .us TLD is an absolute master stroke.
- Leave out the dashes and meaningless numbers. If it's a choice between this-domain.com, thisdomain123.com and thisdomain.net, take the .net. No one remembers to put the dashes or the numbers in, unless they are an integral part of the name like studio54.com or e-books.com.
- If you are lucky enough to find your own domain name that works, buy the .co.uk, .com, .net etc. anyway. The prices are cheap enough - if we’re working with you as a client we’ll charge you about £10 for a .co.uk registered for 2 years. The point is that if your business does become sucessful you already have the other domain names and the money you’ve paid to buy them and keep them registered for, say, 10 years is definately going to be a lot less than paying a solicitor £150 an hour to get them back from someone else.
- If you can save a few pounds with your own domain name or by buying a cheaper domain name, do it, and use the money to get yourself placed higher in the search results using Google AdWords for example.
- If you can't come up with a descriptive domain name, go the other way. Depending on your site's focus, pick a memorable short name that will stick in people's minds, get a great logo and include the name prominently in your advertising and marketing. It's called branding, and it's tried and true. Cobwebbery seems to work for us in this way - we’re a very long way short of a well-known brand, but most of our business comes from referrals from existing clients and everyone who hears the name remembers “Cobwebbery”
- Ask your wife, friend, boyfriend, husband, cousin, uncle or anyone else you can think of. They are going to be the one looking for the site, not you. Some of the best ideas have come from just brainstorming.