How to Choose a Domain Name for Your Business

If you’re thinking about starting a new business, there’s no way around it – you need to have a website. Even if you’re only running a local business and aren’t planning to sell products online, having a website is still crucial because most people begin their research on the Internet when they’re looking for local businesses. Having your own website is the only way to control the narrative surrounding your company. Without a website, you’re letting reviewers on Yelp and other business directories control the narrative – and you definitely don’t want that. 

When you’re planning to launch a website, choosing your domain name is the first step. Your domain – like portotheme.com – is the address that shows up on search results pages, and it’s also the address that people will type when they want to visit your site directly. 

The domain name that you choose can have long-term ramifications on your company and can even play a role in determining whether your new business will be successful at all – so it’s crucial to choose very carefully. Here are the things that you should consider before you make your final decision.

Choose Between Keywords and Branding

Your domain name can be the name of your brand, or it can state what you sell or do. 

Amazon.com, for example, is just a brand name – it doesn’t explain what the company does. A domain name like “InternetBookstore.com” might have explained the company’s purpose more clearly. Imagine being a user of the early web in 1994 and trying to understand why “Amazon.com” was the URL that you needed to type if you wanted to buy books online.

On the other hand, Amazon has grown far past its original purpose and now sells just about every type of product imaginable. That’s one of the drawbacks of using a keyword-based domain name – it can potentially limit your company over the long term.

Here are some other things to consider.

• Having keywords in your domain name can potentially give you a slight boost on Google when it comes to ranking well for a competitive search term. If the sole purpose of your business is to sell a single type of product like baseball cards, nicotine pouches or designer shoes, it might be helpful to have the relevant keyword phrase in your domain name.
• On the other hand, it’s hard to trademark a generic phrase and build a strong brand around it. If Google.com had used a domain name like “SearchEngine.com,” the domain would have done a good job of clearly stating the company’s purpose. That might have been useful during the early days of the web. Google didn’t invent the term “search engine,” though, and they wouldn’t have been able to trademark it. In the long run, the Google.com domain name probably served the company far better.

Your domain name and the name of your company should almost always be the same. You might be tempted to put competitive keywords in your domain name while calling your company something else, but that’s likely to cause confusion among potential customers.

Keep It Short and Memorable

In addition to being very effective for branding, domain names like Google.com and Amazon.com have another major benefit: They’re short and easy to remember. Although it’s likely that many of your short domain name ideas will be taken already, you can come up with plenty of other possibilities if you put your mind to it. 

Along with selecting something that’s short, remember that it’s also important to avoid possible sources of confusion when it comes to knowing how to spell the domain name – especially if marketing channels like radio and word of mouth will be important to you. Using hyphens and numerals in your domain name is usually a bad idea because it can cause confusion.

Have Many Ideas in Mind Before Checking Availability

The first thing you need to know about choosing a domain name for your business is that you should have many ideas in mind before you visit a registrar to see whether any of your ideas are available to register. The reason why you want to have a long list of potential domain names is because many of them will already be taken. It’s sometimes possible to buy a domain name that’s already registered – we’ll talk about that shortly – but registering a new domain will be significantly less expensive. 

If you’re fortunate enough to find that one of your best ideas is available, you should be prepared to register it immediately. You don’t want to check domain availability if you’re just browsing because of domain name front running. When you check to see if a domain is available, it can be locked to that registrar for a period of five days. During those five days, the registrar may run ads on the domain – and if the ads are successful, the registrar may end up keeping the domain for itself. 

Even if the registrar that you’re using doesn’t do front running, you’ll still want to register your chosen domain right away if it’s available because someone else may get the same idea and register it for themselves if you wait too long.

Register as Many International Variations as Possible

Google.com isn’t the only domain name containing the word “Google.” There’s also Google.net, Google.org, Google.co.uk and so on. When you register your domain, you should also grab as many variations of that name as possible. If you don’t do that – and your idea is a very good one – someone else will register a variation that you’re not using. If that happens, Google won’t know which domain to show when people search for your company’s name – and potential customers won’t know which result is the right one to click.

Want to Buy an Existing Domain? Check Its History First

Suppose you have a domain name idea that’s absolutely perfect for your business, and you simply don’t want to settle for anything else if you don’t have to. When you check to see if the domain is available, though, you see that it’s already registered. Is there anything that you can do? Try visiting the domain to see what’s there. You may find that it isn’t being used for anything right now and that it’s being offered for sale. In this case, you have a potential opportunity. If a price isn’t shown on the page, try contacting the domain owner to see how much they’re looking for. 

The prices that domain sellers ask are often outrageous, but that’s just the opening offer. They start high with the understanding that potential buyers will want to negotiate. Before closing the deal, though, you should do some research to find out whether the domain name has been used for an actual website in the past. If the domain has been used for a business, that might not be a problem for you. You don’t want to buy a domain name, though, if it has ever been used to distribute malware or host illegal content.