Digital success starts with a great website and a great website starts with a great domain name. While you may feel tempted to race off and start visualising your overall web design concept or strategise your site's color scheme, it's not where you launch your project. You start by choosing and registering a surefire domain name. And to make things...
1. Do a research on your domain name. Before you register a domain name, you should do your homework first. Try to find out if there is already a registered business using the same name and check if you can actually legally own the domain of your choice.
Also, look at the domain names of the competitors and leaders in your industry. Take note of the keywords they include and their domain extension.
2. Make it easier to remember. There are millions of registered domain names across the globe so choosing a domain that's catchy and memorable is essential. It's important to have a web address that users can relay digitally and share via word of mouth with ease.
Once you've come up with a name, share it with your family, friends and colleagues to make sure it sounds appealing and makes sense to them.
3. Keep it unique and brandable - Your domain name is a huge part of your company's overall branding, therefore, it must be done right. Think about how you'll want to talk about your company in the future, as well as URL extensions and keywords when you brainstorm for a name.
Choose a domain name that has a strong brand recall. It needs to work well with your logo and overall site aesthetic.
4. Be Trendy but not too Trendy. Hashtags, viral phrases and buzzwords are cool and hype – but make sure you somehow manage to select a buzzword with a staying power. We've all seen how quickly today's trendy catchphrases can turn into tomorrow's awkward tagline.
Plus, overly-complex domain names increases the risk of typos or misspellings. Remember that even Flickr had to finally purchase flicker.com to stop the misspelling craze for their website.
5. Use the right domain name extension for your site. If you are looking to establish a long-term brand online, .com is still the best choice for you. Using other redirects to drive traffic such as .net or .org is totally fine but owning the .com or the equivalent TLD for your target market country is very crucial.
There are a number of reasons why this matters, but the most critical one is for your web users. While there are thousands of TLDs to choose from, .com still carries the most trust with it.
6. Avoid numbers and hyphens in your domain name. The best practice is to stick to the letters from A to Z and leave numbers and other symbols out, regardless of how tempting it may be. When reviewing the readability of your domain name, you'll also want to make sure that when it's written together without spaces it doesn't read differently. Even if you have the best intentions, you don't want to spell out a weird and difficult word in referring to your site.
7. Make sure it's easy to pronounce. So, you have a unique blog name and many are starting to get curious about it, but if no one knows how to pronounce it or type it as a URL, your traffic numbers might suffer as a result.
If a domain name is confusing, it's more likely that users will have typos and get lost as they try to search for your blog or site. Avoid hurting your traffic numbers, by choosing a simple, clear domain name.
This is especially true for those who are advertising through social media live stream or broadcast. When streamers promote your domain name and people find it clear and easy to pronounce and memorise, it will result into a great traffic on your website.
8. Don't sweat it too much if your "slamdunk" domain name is already taken - If the domain name you really desire is already taken, it's not the end of the world for you. There are still ways on how you can get your hands on it.
If the domain name is not in use (there's no website or the domain is 'parked' - which means it features only ads), then there's a good chance the owner only bought it to sell it later. And if there's a website on the domain, you can still try your luck and contact the owner asking if they're willing to sell the domain off. Low chance of success in this scenario, but still worth a try.
9. Check social media handles first – it would be a smart thing to do to take a few hours to see if your preferred domain name is already in use as a handle on social media platforms and how it is being used. If it's already being used as a social media handle, you need to think again before pursuing because this might affect your branding and promotion once you link your website and publish contents on social media. It would be best if you keep your name and branding original even if you have different nature of businesses.
It's ideal to have a domain and social media handles match in order to create a stronger brand. Visitors will feel more confident finding your client online, and they'll have more credibility when you share all the cool stuff you're doing.
