Coming up with your domain name can be one of the most challenging aspects of creating your website. The problem is that your company name may already be taken. Another issue is that your company name may not be the perfect name for a website. Here are a few things to consider when working on your domain name.
Does it describe your business? For example, if you’ve incorporated under the name J. Smith, Inc, a domain name of www.jsmith.com doesn’t really describe much. The company could be a small real estate business, or it could make homemade jewellery. In this case, you may want to modify your domain name. Something like www.jsmithpetgrooming.com is much more informative and acts almost like a keyword for your business.
Another thing to consider is how unique your domain name is. A unique name like www.theonestopshopforukflags.com is very unique, and web surfers probably won’t end up on your site by accident. However, if you purchase a domain name like www.goggle.com, chances are you’ll get some visitors who mistyped Google. This can be helpful in getting more visitors to your site, but it may not actually result in more sales. Most people will probably immediately correct their typo and never really look at your site.
In addition to your domain name, you need to think about what suffix you want. While .com is popular with commercial sites, you can also purchase .net, .org, or .co.uk, among others. If you’re working on a budget, you may only want one domain. However, for a little more money, you can purchase two or three and have them all point to the same site. Having the .com, .net, and .biz domains for the same site can help you get more traffic. Likewise, you can always buy several different domains and have those all go to the same website. www.joesflowers.com, www.joesfloralshop.com, and www.joesflorist.com could all point to the same website. You would want to use one of them on all of your marketing materials and such while the other two would help catch different combinations of keywords.