As an online marketer, I am constantly approached by people who have a great idea for their small business, but terrible ideas on how to establish themselves online. Usually, a good business owner will have the energy, resources, and drive to take their business online, but they lack one key element. Experience.
“You’re doing it wrong.”
At this point many businees owners try to take their online marketing efforts into their own hands an the result is something similar to a high school science student testing out his home made jet pack…disaster. Everybody has been to that website. There is often blinking text, annoying animated graphics, and a picture of some creepy guy posing for the camera with a mullet (feel free to check out this website if you don’t know what I’m talking about).
So, as a favor to all small business owners who would like to take that very first step of buying a domain name for their website, I have compiled a list of rules to follow. Hopefully, this will prevent colleagues from performing the infamous “facepalm” gesture (as seen above) when you tell them the name of your “awesome” new site.
1. Short is Better
I promised “rules” so here they are. Try to keep the url at 3 words or less, but more importantly, I usually say 5 syllables or less. Despite the fact that your website or blog lives on a computer, mere humans eventually will utter is name. If you thought ReallyGreatDiscountCowboyFurniture.com was a good idea for your site’s name, think again. With domain names, less is more. Even less is even more.
Envoca.com is better than EnvocaDesign.com. Why go shorter? It leaves less room for a spelling error and frankly people are lazy. Plus, you can always go buy up those variations or your domain name and just have them redirect to your shorter url.
2. Keywords Are a Want, Not a Need
In the early days of SEO (mid to late 90’s) search engines placed a lot of imortance on the keywords in your site’s URL. StevesKnives.com always ranked better than StevesCutlery.com for the keyword “knives”. Today, this is not so much the case. Sure, Google will often favor exact matches on a domain name but having a website address of http://www.KeywordKeywordKeyword.com just doesn’t help as much as it used to. Therefore the rule is, “If you can fit keywords into your domain name for the site then great, if not, no big deal.” Try googling the phrase “shoe store“, you’ll see what I mean.
3. Avoid Hyphens
Once again, this rule comes back from the 90’s. Back in the day, when having a keyword in your address meant a lot, spammers took hyphens to the extreme. For spammers, not only would you set up KeywordKeywordKeyword.com, but also Keyword-Keyword-Keyword.com, and Keyword-KeywordKeyword.com. You get the idea. The reason real websites generally didn’t use hyphens at the time was because of website users.
For example, when you give someone your phone number you don’t say “five zero three dash four eight one dash…” You just say the numbers. Well, people do the same thing with websites. If you own a website at Great-Scooters.com and someone tells a friend about it, they will almost always go to GreatScooters.com, find that there is no website (or a competitors website), and you will lose business.
4. Stick to the .COMs
Unless you are a company outside the states your url should end in “.com”. Always. This rule is similar to the hyphen rule in the sense that when someone says “CoolSite.net” the second party almost always goes home and types “CoolSite.com”. The only businesses that can break this rule are the cutting edge tech websites that employ domain hacks such as del.icio.us, whom by the way, also uses delicious.com. Tech websites often have a user demographic narrow enough that they can get away with this sort of thing but your average online business does not.
5. Forget Acronyms
This rule comes down to an issue of branding. If your car dealership’s name is “Super Duper Discount Dodges”, do not try to get people to go to SDDD.com. At face value it has absolutely nothing to do with your brand. The exception to this rule is if your company name is “The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network” but your brand is know as “ESPN”, then that would be the case where you should set up ESPN.com. Aside from that, finding .COM domain names with 4 letter or less that are still available is almost impossible these days.
6. Shamelessly Push Your Brand
If you have put any effort into developing your brand up until this point, then now is the time to push it. Generally speaking, CorporateSuiteShoppe.com always gets more traffic and makes more sales than SuitesForLease.com. Brands that do well offline will always do better online if they use their brand to their advantage. Experience tells us that this is true more and more.
So, hopefully this has been helpful to anyone trying to venture out into the world of online marketing. If you have any specific questions as to what you should call your future website, feel free to contact us online here, or you can find me on twitter as @garrettgillas.
Photo Credits:
Our mistake was to go for .net instead of .com. We thought it sounded more fashionable. Duh.
I couldn’t agree more with the avoiding the URL hyphens recommendation. what’s worse is when the owners forget to tell customers about those little -’s mentioning their domain. painful!
@Patricia
Remember you can always change the domain of your site later. Just make sure you use proper 301 redirect(s) to your new url.
@brett
Yeah, this is why most SEO’s these days advise you build your websites around users first, and robots second. A hyphenated url is a seemingly small error which will always end up being a big problem for the user experience.
This is such a superior article. I look forward to seeing more of your writing.
Another tip … avoid homophones or words which can be spelled in different ways. Someone recommended a local firm called New Media to me and I went to google it. I couldn’t find it and gave up. Turned out it was called Knew Media.
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Great post. I have been going back and forth for about six months on a name for my next Website. The problem is, the .com version of my ideal URL is taken, but not being used so I could go .net, what have wavered on this. I have almost used a homophone for the name, but again, not ideal. Ugh. The search continues…
Great advise! Particularly sticking to the dot com addresses. The .us, etc. addresses can seem so unprofessional. It’s not a fair judgement is often the perception.
@Todd
Thanks for the compliment. I feel your pain. People often really don’t realize how hard it is to get a really good domain these days.
@John Boyle
I agree totally, it’s surprising how often I talk to people that don’t even know that a domain name can end in something other than “.com”.
How much web site traffic is really generated by word of mouth these days? It’s nice to have a short ‘brand’ name for your business cards but beyond that most clicks for most businesses are surely going to come from search engine traffic, links from other web pages, IM, email, social networks, … and as such the actual name matters less. This is especially true now that URL shorteners are hiding links more and more.
Aside from the massively over-SEO’d ’shoes’ category I think most small businesses would do better in their niche field by including at least some of their keywords in their domain name even if the effect is small.
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@Ian
In response to your first question, this depends on how strong their offline brand is. A lot of the businesses that we do work for have fairly successful offline success already. A lot of them are looking to post all of their company information, products, and resources online to better cater to existing and referral customers. For them, including their brand in the domain is most important because people will be searching for their business name.
As for someone looking to start their business online from the base up, that is when I would recommend focusing on keywords more.
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