Starting Your Own Business with Successful Entrepreneur Erica Douglass

Choosing a domain name: Your difficult
questions answered! What domain name should you choose for your business? Is a .com still important? Should you pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a .com, or just register a .biz or other extension? Are Google search engine ranks affected by whether you have a .com or not?

In this post, I’ll answer these questions and more, and make some recommendations to help you choose the right domain name. Some of my suggestions may be controversial!

Short and Catchy, or Longer?

There are basically two types of domain names: short and catchy or long and keyword-filled. (I define “short” as anything with fewer than 8 characters before the dot.) Which type of domain name you use depends on how you plan to attract visitors to your site. If you plan to mostly attract people by word of mouth, use something short and catchy.

I tend to build sites that get most of their traffic from Google. In that case, a keyword-filled domain is preferable. What do I mean by that? Let’s say you own Snazzy Sandwiches in Saskatoon. You’d probably lean toward snazzysandwiches.com or snazzysandwiches.ca (since Saskatoon is in Saskatchewan, Canada.)

But you may also want to consider buying a keyword-driven domain name. In this case, more people are probably searching for “sandwiches in Saskatoon” or “sandwiches Saskatoon” than your business name. Unless you are the only sandwich shop in town, one of the best ways to capture this traffic is to also pick up the keyword-driven name–in this case, sandwichessaskatoon.com or .ca.

The key here is to find out exactly what people are searching for in Google and other search engines, and picking up the “exact match” keyword domain name. That means no “the”, “a”, hyphens, or any other extraneous words. So, if people are typing in sandwiches Saskatoon, you want sandwichessaskatoon as the first part of your domain name.

How Do You Find Out What People Are Typing Into Google?

I’m a big fan of using the free Google Keyword Tool to figure out domain names. Find a keyword that is searched between 10,000 and 50,000 times per month, and see if the exact match domain name is available.

Every once in a while, you’ll hit a home run. I had a client once who did marketing for a certain type of business. He paid me for consulting time to figure out how to get more business from his website.

I ran the Google keyword tool for him and found out that business owners were actually typing in the type of the business followed by “marketing” about 800 times a month! Better yet, the exact match .com domain name was available! With some savvy tricks, I helped him conquer 2 of the top 3 slots in Google for those keywords. It added 5 figures a year to the bottom line of his business…and took about three hours of work.

What if the .Com Isn’t Available?

But more often, the exact match .com is not available. It’s either in use or for sale for hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Let’s say you’re setting up a site to sell home remedies. You hit up the Google keyword tool and see that “home remedies for acne” is searched 40,500 times a month. (This is true, by the way.) That’s a huge avalanche of traffic if you get ranked #1 for that keyword, and domain names with the keyword in them naturally rank higher than domain names without.

But all the domains are taken. The .com, .net, and .org are all parked–meaning they don’t have any real content on them, and may be for sale. You know the owners will probably want hundreds of dollars for them. The .biz looks like a scam site.

So what do you do? This is a pretty common quandary. Do you go for one of the weird extensions like .cc or .tv, or try to buy one of the more common domains like .com or .net? Or do you just start over from scratch?

First, let’s talk about what all those weird extensions are. Any two-letter extension, like .cc, .ws, and .tv, are actually country codes. Some countries, like Tuvalu, a tiny island nation of just 12,000 people, got extraordinarily lucky in the “domain name lottery”. Tuvalu licensed the .tv extension to Verisign, a top domain name registrar, for “not less than $1 million per quarter.” Wow! (Here’s the entire list of country codes.)

I tread very carefully with these two-letter extensions. Except for ones that have been widely adopted, like .tv and .us, I tend to avoid them. I also tend to avoid .org, unless you just want to set up a blog on it and you’re not selling anything, because .org is, in many people’s minds, still associated with its original purpose of serving non-profit organizations.

In order, I prefer: .com; .net; .biz; .us. Since none of those are available, if you were my client, I would advise you to go back to Google at this point, and search for similar keywords. Sure enough, a similar keyword, acne home remedy, with 27,100 searches per month, has the .biz available, and in this case, I’d advise you to buy that.

But Don’t You Need a .Com?

There’s a myth floating around that you need a .com to rank better in Google. That’s a complete myth, I assure you. For Google, it’s more important to have proper keywords in your domain name than to have the .com.

The reason to get a .com is because people tend to assume that your site is the .com. So, if you don’t have the .com and someone else does, that other site will pick up some traffic that would otherwise go to your site.

If the .com is available for registration, go ahead and get it. I recently found a keyword that had 27,100 searches per month, and the .com was available. I immediately snagged it and plan to use it as an advertising-driven niche site. But more commonly, you’ll find the .com is for sale for a few hundred dollars.

In this case, I recommend that you use an alternative extension, set up your website, and then reinvest your profits. That’s what I did with Blog Set Up. I used the Google keyword tool to figure out which domain I wanted, and then bought the .us. The site was profitable immediately, and I reinvested the profits back in to buying the .com version of the domain name. The acquisition closed this week, so blogsetup.us is now blogsetup.com!

In conclusion, I only recommend buying an expensive domain name if you’ve already launched your business and are making money. It’s perfectly acceptable to start your business on a .biz or .us, especially if you’re getting most of your traffic via Google. Then buy the .com with your first profits. If your business isn’t profitable, then, you’re not out hundreds or thousands of dollars with the .com. But if your business is profitable, I recommend snagging the .com as soon as you can afford it.

Do you have thoughts or suggestions on choosing a domain name? Let me hear them in the comments!

Recommended Reading:

• Namecheap. I recommend Namecheap as a good domain name registrar. Never use Go Daddy to register domains.
• Go Daddy. The link here is to a site called nodaddy.com, which was set up by a friend of mine after Go Daddy screwed up his entire business by shutting his domain name down for days. I know another person this happened to, as well. Never use Go Daddy for anything–not hosting, not domain name registration, anything. Again, I recommend NameCheap (above).