Cautiously choosing the right domain name is the first step when starting up an online business or a website for your business. When creating a website, coming up with a domain name needs to be carefully decided and there are several considerations to be made. A domain name can greatly affect the website traffic which in turn results to the amount of sales revenue realized from the whole website.
When registering your domain name, you should always check around and search deeply to ensure that there is no other business that has the same name as the one you intend to give your website. Otherwise this would result to trademark infringement.
In order to have an effective domain names, there are tips that should guide you in coming up with the most suitable name for your website. Some may seem obvious but they are often overlooked. The basic tips that should always be considered are:
i. Choose a simple, memorable and short domain name: The main aim for creating a website is to promote your business which will help in the sales increment. For this to happen, your domain name should be very short and easy to remember. It should be a name that will be easily pronounced by anybody visiting your site. There is nothing that turns a second-time website visitor than trying to remember what the website’s name was. In addition to your website name being short, your domain name should be related to the type of business you intend your website to be.
ii. Make your domain name unique and easy to remember: With each passing day, more and more businesses are coming up. One of the main ways in which potential clients will remember you, is if you have a unique name for your business. Your name should not give a reputation of an existing business but it should rather have a name that stands out from your competitors. It is so bad if your website, judged by your domain name, is regularly confused with an existing business.
iii. Make your domain name easy to type: If your domain name requires some attention in order to type correctly, it may lead to loss of traffic and it also degrades your brand’s market value. This is caused mainly if your website has a weird spelling and if you have used a lot of words and sounds which may be hard to remember. If you want real market value for your website, ensure that anybody can type in your website easily and always remember that your competitors are just a “back button” away.
iv. Try to create and accomplish the visitors’ expectations: Creating the first impression is very vital. The choice of your domain name should be able to tell the visitors what type of business they should expect once they enter the website. A site such as www.olea.com can clearly tell the first time visitors that they should expect to find best quality kiosks. Lack of creating an expectation from your domain name, requires extra amount of investments to create awareness of what your website deals with. Ensure that visitors are aware of the website’s business and that their expectations are fulfilled once they visit.
v. Avoid use of hyphens and numbers in your domain name: Although the use of hyphens can have advantages such as: the search engines are able to differentiate your use of keywords better which in turn translates to more and more website visitors, the use of hyphens can in great ways have a negative impact on your website. Some of the most common disadvantages being: it is easy to lose potential clients as people may tend to forget to input hyphens; it is not easy for people to recommend your site verbally. The use of hyphens and numbers result to a poor correlation with the Google rankings, branding and the general website traffic.
Having said the above five key points to consider when coming up with the domain name, it is very important to consider the web developers and designers who will work together with you to ensure that the goals of your online business is realized.
