Choosing the right domain name is crucial for a business’s online presence. Simple, short, and easy-to-remember names with a “.com” extension are best. Avoid hyphens and use numbers with caution. Test potential names with friends and family and purchase competing domains. Additional country-specific extensions are available for global businesses. Hyphenated URLs are outdated, and numbers can be confusing.
Your choice of domain names can make or break any business. Customers must be able to find the company’s online presence quickly and easily, or else the company risks losing potential buyers to the competition. The best domain name is simple, short, and easy to remember. Anyone interested in purchasing a domain name should try to purchase one that ends in a “.com” extension, avoid hyphenated Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), and use numbers with caution.
Simple domain names shouldn’t support fancy and unique spellings because visitors might not remember them and might end up on a competitor’s website instead. Once you buy a simple name, even common misspelled domains should be blocked to beat similar companies. To get a list of potential competing domains, the buyer should consider verbally expressing their company to family and friends, asking them to type it into their browser to see what results they get, then buy the wrong domain names.
When it comes to choosing domain names, shorter is better. Long, long names can be difficult to remember and are more likely to be misspelled. Professional domain names such as business, brand, or personal names are what individuals typically try first when searching for a company’s website, and if the company promotes specific products, the buyer should consider the buying URLs even in product names.
“Dot com” extensions are by far the most popular because people usually type this extension by default. Other extensions such as “.info”, “.org” and “.net” are searched frequently, but not as often as “.com” sites. By the same token, domain name choosers should purchase these other extensions to prevent competitors from stealing them. If your business reaches customers worldwide, additional country-specific extensions are available, such as “.uk” for the United Kingdom or “.au” for Australia.
Originally, people choosing domain names thought that hyphenated URLs allowed them to embed longer keywords and thus drive more traffic to their sites. This may have been true at the time, but hyphenated URLs have become a thing of the past, because some people got confused and misspelled the long names. Some search engines may favor hyphenated URLs, or they may favor URLs that don’t include hyphens.
Numbers within a domain name, especially those used as an abbreviation of a word and not a number, can be confusing. Many people won’t know if a company’s URL uses, for example, ‘4’, ‘four’, ‘for’ or ‘previous’ or if it uses ‘2’, ‘a’, ‘two’ or ‘too much’ . “Numbers don’t necessarily have to be excluded entirely from the domain name, but they should be used with caution as they can be confusing. You can purchase alternative domain names that include numbers or some spelling errors to avoid comparisons with competitors or someone who is trying to exploit user errors when typing a URL.
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