Choosing the right domain name for your website is crucial. A good domain can help your SEO, brand recognition, and make it easier for past and future customers to find your website. Here’s how to choose a domain name for your new website.
How to Choose a Domain Name
If you’re creating a website for your business, it’s a good idea to use your exact business name as your website if at all possible. This will help your new website to rank quickly for your business name and related keywords as Google and other search engines consider URL when ranking a website. This will also make it easy for your current customers to find you.
If You Can’t Be Exact, Be Close
There are a variety of high-profile companies (like Peloton, or more aggressively, Nissan) that have not been able to capture their brand domain name. If you have a very common business name like “Luigi’s Pizza” you may also run into this.
If you have a local business like a restaurant, physical retail store, or are a local service provider, it may be a good choice to add your neighborhood, city, or state to your business name when choosing a domain like Luigisonmadison.com. This can help with local SEO as well as serve as an easy way for customers to pick out your website from another similarly named website.
Consider Unique Domain Extensions
There are about 280 different website domain extensions in the world. While the most common is .com, most people are pretty familiar with others like .net, .org, or .gov. In addition to these standard extensions, country extensions are available as an appendage to every domain as well.
For most small website owners or those that do a lot of radio or tv advertising, choosing an alternative domain name may not be the best choice. Most consumers are so accustomed to websites that end in .com that they will often forget the new extension and may end up visiting a competitor website.
This is not to say these should never be used. If you can find a clever and catchy domain name using an alternate ending, try it out. Make sure your URL ends in something relevant to your business (for example express.cars) and that the .com version is in a completely different industry (like express.com) so you don’t accidentally send business to your competitor.
Don’t Add Non-Standard Characters
You can technically add a dash (-) or fada character (áéíóú) to a website domain, but that doesn’t mean you should. These characters are easily confused, sometimes hard to find on the keyboard, and will make it difficult for your customers to remember. Numbers can also be used in a domain name, but take care with these as well. Having all the numbers grouped together like 5678dance.com is easy enough for people to remember, but something like sw3at.com is much harder to recall.
Once you have a domain name chosen, your next step will be to register a domain name.
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