You will already have a name for your company. You will probably have thought long and hard about it. Perhaps it revealed itself to you like a bolt of lightning in the dark, or is the product of a singular recurring constant that has permeated your entire life. Maybe you didn’t give it much thought at all, it sort of just came to you and stuck. Whatever way t’was destiny. The important first step in founding your web presence, is taking your chosen name and forming it into a url, that will come to uniquely identify you online.
The domain name of our website is www.impressiondigital.com for example. It wasn’t particularly hard to come up with, we simply took the initial name of our company. For those who want to know, its a play on words between the digital marketing metric “impression” and the act of making a good impression, essentially impressing someone. The metric measures the number of times an ad is displayed, whether this is organic, paid, display or on a social media platform. We added the .co.uk suffix to locate us more specifically within the UK, where we plan to conduct most of our business. As of this week, the .uk domain name has been created as a new simpler alternative, something we’ve already written about in a previous blog.
As a general rule, there are a number of points to consider when selecting your domain name.
- Keep it quick and short – audiences are more likely to remember a shorter name and are more likely to type it correctly.
- Do Keyword Research – Use Google Keyword Planner to research the words related to your industry are readily searching for on a high
- Get creative and be unique – domain names can have a kind of rhythm when said aloud, and this can add further strength to your brand.
- Avoid numbers and hyphens – You want to avoid numbers and hyphens, also letters such as q, z, x, c and p, because these can lead to confusion when typing. In terms of lettering, these letters are often associated with difficult spelling.
- Get your domain registered quickly – once you have an idea for your domain name, you should go ahead and purchase it quickly. Domain names are supposed to be unique, so you can find yourself coming up with a clever domain name that has already been purchased. It is always worth checking godaddy, or other domain providers to see whether your preferred domain names are free.
- Reserve and purchase multiple domain names – With most domain providers, you can usually pick up multiple versions of your domain name with different extensions. This will further protect your brand, you won’t have spammers or competitors coming in to use a slightly altered version of your domain name, causing confusion with your users which could reflect badly on your company.
Selecting a domain name is an important first step in creating your online presence. It is also an exercise in one of the more fundamental lessons of online marketing, engage the audience directly.
