How Your Domain Name Can Affect Potential Visitors

Selecting the right domain name is a crucial part of building a successful business online. Many people get so engrossed in the design aspects that they forget how important their domain name will be to the future of their company.

What is a domain name? Put simply, it’s the address of your website. Ebay’s domain name in the UK is www.ebay.co.uk and that’s a pretty perfect domain name because the site is called Ebay and the domain name is basically the same thing. Sounds simple right? But many companies get this wrong and don’t ensure that the domain and the site name are the same thing or close to the same thing. This is confusing for potential visitors if they’re popping by on a word of mouth recommendation for example because they’re most likely to search you out through your company name. So an ecommerce company going by the name of Janet’s Sewing Supplies needs to be aware that choosing a domain name such as www.jsew.com will do her no favours whatsoever. She needs www.janetssewingsupplies.com to maximise her chances of success.

Keep it simple
Janet’s Sewing Supplies is a good example of a bad name; it’s too long, too wordy and there are simply too many S’s in there. People remember short URL’s far more frequently than they do long ones. A single word is the most successful in general…two or three is passable but one word domains will always be more memorable.

Similarly, try to avoid the use of acronyms, dots and dashes and other symbols as they’re confusing and more likely to be forgotten or missed out by visitors.

Use Keywords
Where possible, the use of keywords is a very helpful part of your domain name. www.vintageposters.com is always going to be found by potential visitors searching for…well, vintage posters!

If your domain name is easily misspelt then you may find it helpful to consider the potential mistakes which people are going to make when entering your address. People make a lot of spelling errors when typing and they’re very predictable too; www.vintageposters.com can easily become www.vintageposter.com or even www.vintegeposter.com. Consider these potential errors and register those domain names in addition to your own. Another consideration is to register other top level domain names such as www.vintageposters.net and www.vintageposters.org to stop loss of turnover in cases where people are misdirected.

Consider the hyphen
Hyphens are great and not so great for business. They’re a good way to separate multiple words within a longer domain name for instance www.janets-sewing-supplies.com but they’re bad in terms of making a domain name more forgettable and more easily mis-typed. On the flip side again, hyphens make it simpler for search engines to pick up your site because those single words are more recognisable than www.janetssewingsupplies.com

In order to make your business easy to find, memorable and suitable for search engines to work with, you need to think like a potential visitor before you select your name. You may need to make compromises and you may need to change your idea of a catchy name in order to succeed but keep your mind open and your domain name will do the work for you.