This is a common questions we get asked at Onlineassist4u.
As always the decision comes back to what is right for your specific business not what is right for Google or Bing or Yahoo or any other external factor.
And what is right for your business most commonly equals what is right to get more sales, more revenue and more profit.
Selecting A Domain Name – The Important Factors to Consider
There are a few very important questions you should consider when making this decision.
- Will my existing customers be able to find my business online ?
- Will new potential customers that have heard of my business be able to find it online ?
- Will customers searching for my product or service be able to find my business online ?
- Will my business be able to get onto the front page of Google to get part of that 60%+ of traffic that never searches beyond the front page ?
Most people, when selecting a domain name will try and secure a name that closely mirrors their business name.
If my business is called Kirk Plumbing then I might try and secure kirkplumbing.com or, if located in Australia, kirkplumbing.com.au as I am targetting local clients with my plumbing service (in this case it makes a lot of sense to try and buy both domains but that is another story).
We will call this approach “naming your domain name after your business name”.
Pros and Cons of Naming Your Domain After Your Business Name
On the plus side;-
- My existing clients will be able to find me quickly
- Potential new clients that have heard of my business through friends etc will also be able to find me very quickly
On the negative side;-
- There is only one potential relevant keyword in my domain name “plumbing”.
- It will be extremely difficult for me to get to Page 1 on Google for this keyword.
ASIDE – How do I know it will be difficult to get to page 1 of Google for the keyword “plumbing” ?
keyword research for "plumbing"
To work this out the first test I would give the word plumbing is a “common sense test”.
A single word “keyword” that is fully descriptive of the industry I am in is likely to be totally dominated by big players in my market.
They have websites that have been around forever and they have thousands of backlinks to their site and pages on their website.
They will continue to inhabit the front page and I will be relegated to page “irrelevant”.
Why compete with them when I am likely to fail ? It is a dumb move !!!
The next test I would do (and Onlineassist4u will do this for you if you ask us to after you sign up for our services) is to do some professional keyword research on the term plumbing to validate my common sense test and to see if there are easier and better alternatives to my blatantly obvious keyword choice.
We use a tool called Market Samurai to do this and we have performed the analysis and the results are shown to the right top.
Our test is restricted to the Australian market because this is where this imaginary business is located.
SEO competition for keyword plumbing
The keyword “plumbing” gets a lot of search queries on average per day in our local Australian market.
This is fantastic for a business ranked number one as, on average, 40% of the clicks for that keyword will go to their website.
The rest of the front page will get a good whack of clicks too – especially if the first couple of sites listed are not plumbing service suppliers.
This does ring alarm bells though. The keyword “plumbing” is obviously very valuable.
What can we expect for something of great value ?
Thats right, a whole bunch of bigtime players will be all over this keyword (see chart to lower right).
There is very little (if any) chance of my little plumbing business getting first page for the keyword “plumbing” unless I spend up big on SEO services, adding content, building backlinks etc.
All that effort just doesn’t make any business sense. So I am not going to do it – period.
Pros and Cons of Naming Your Domain to Get Search Traffic From Google
What are the advantages and disadvantages of taking this approach ?
On the plus side;-
- If we do our research properly and then build our website and promote it we can get a good flow of hot leads through Google – leads that we might not have otherwise received
- Google loves a keyword rich domain name. It gives us a “free” boost up the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
On the negative side;-
- This takes time and effort and can cost money (speculate to accumulate) – will we be sufficiently committed to do this and continue to do it ?
- Our existing clients might find it harder to find our website if our name is not in the domain name
So what would we have to do if we decided to take this option ?
As we said above. To get a decent volume of search traffic from Google we need to be on page 1 for a search for our keyword phrase.
We also need to select a keyword phrase that gets a good volume of searches per day and isn’t overrun by competitors that have good SEO on their websites, have lots of backlinks to their websites and have websites that have been around for many years.
So, in the interests of being accurate, I am going to go away now and do a bit of research to find just the right keyword. Once again, I will be using that most professional of keyword research tools, Market Samurai.
The results are in and it was a pretty quick search. “Plumber Perth” has a small (but for my small business OK) average volume of search per day.
The competition is there but with diligence and a bit of hard work I believe I can get into those top 10 entries and onto Google’s front page.
Now, other businesses are not dumb and through their foresight they have already taken plumberperth.com.au and plumber-perth.com.au
What do I do now ?
Well, all is not lost and I am going to hit two birds with one stone here (my apologies to all the animal’s rights activists – I have never actually thrown a stone at a bird – or shot any living thing either for that matter).
I am going to name my domain kirkplumberperth.com.au
I could also have selected kirk-plumberperth.com.au but I find it is difficult to explain a hyphen to people over the phone.
Conclusion
So what is the right way to go ?
Do I choose a domain name that reflects my business name or one that will get me traffic through Google ?
Unfortunately there is no single best answer.
For some businesses choosing a domain name that reflects their business name is best and for others trying to get search traffic is extremely important.
If you can get both in a single domain name (and it is not so long or complex that it is impossible for your clients to enter into Google) then that might be the best compromise for you because you get some Google keyword goodness plus you get your business name into the domain name as well.
The best advice we can give is go back to your business plan – identify what type of business you are – where you are taking your business – who is your market – what is important to them etc.
Then do the right keyword research or get a professional to do it for you.
Then select a domain name that reflects your review and the keyword research results.
This will give you the best answer for your particular business.
Postscript – You Guys Chose The Business Name for Your Domain Name – Why ?
At Onlineassist4u we chose our business name as our domain name. We have onlineassist4u.com and onlineassist4u.com.au registered.
Why did we do this when we are supposed to be all techy and great at search engine marketing and stuff ?
Like I said at the top of this article. This is a business decision and it must be viewed as such. 100%.
For us, we were establishing a new business that we knew would have much of its success locally at first due to our business strategy of working from business referral clubs and referrals in general.
So if our business was to come from people we met in person and from those people referring us then having our name in the domain name was essential.
Another overriding factor for us was the immense competition for keyword terms that are important for our industry.
Terms like SEO, search engine optimization, web development etc are well and truly owned by people who really do know what they are doing.
Many of them have websites that have been going for years and have tens of thousands of backlinks.
It makes no sense for us as a young business to compete with those guys for those keywords. We would be putting a humungous amount of energy into something that was not guaranteed to bring results.
As we move forward we will find other micro niches we desire to work in, we will do our professional market research and we will build sites that have the keywords in their domain names (we have a few already as it happens).
So, we have a domain name strategy that is based 100% on our business strategy rather than on Google and search. This is the correct way to do it.