How to Choose a Domain Name That Attracts The Right Customers
The quickest way to getting eyeballs on your business these days is by establishing an online presence and central to establishing a powerful online presence is choosing a domain name that will attract the right customers.
This is one of the things that often goes overlooked - how your domain name attracts or turns away customers. Let’s look at a few tips.
1. Make Sure Your Domain Describes Your Business
What your website offers should be clear from the domain name. Don’t make your potential visitors guess at what they’ll find on your website.
For example, if your name happens to be Sue Brown and you own a hair salon called Sue’s Hair Salon, get a domain name like, www.sueshairsalon.com instead of www.suebrown.com. Seems pretty obvious, but you’ll be amazed at how many business owners use their personal names as domain names instead of choosing one that specifically describes their business.
Keep it as short as possible as well. It’s easier for your customers to remember and they’re less likely to make typing errors when they enter it in their web browser.
2. Get A Domain That Includes Your Keywords
It’s becoming increasingly important for business owners to have their websites indexed and ranked well in search engines like Google.com, MSN.com and Yahoo.com. And it helps this cause tremendously if you have a keyword-rich domain name. The reason for this is simple: Your potential customers search using specific keyword phrases to find what they’re looking for.
Spending the time to research your keywords and find a domain that uses them, while still meeting the first criteria (descriptive, short as possible) is well worth the time.
Of course, there are other SEO tactics to implement for better rankings, but getting a keyword-rich domain name is the first step towards ensuring your website will be search engine friendly. Avoid using any weird characters like apostrophes and even hyphens in your domain name as this will eventually affect rankings.
3. Must A Domain Name End With .com?
Well, the answer is yes and no. There’s no reason you can’t use a different extension like .net or .biz if that’s the only way you can get the domain you want. It’s not the best choice however, because everybody thinks in terms of .com. If your site uses something else, it’s going to be an uphill battle to get people to recognize your site. If someone else already owns the .com version, they’re going to get a lot of free traffic thanks to your marketing.
How would you feel if you spend time and money marketing your website and some of those people wound up on your competitor’s customer list instead?
Unless you’re intentionally targeting to brand your business as, let’s say, a nonprofit organization, in which case the .org extension is highly recommended, then sticking to the instantly recognizable .com extension is the best way to go.
Don’t rush into picking a domain name. Take the time to research your market and find keyword phrases that people actually search for. Websites such as Wordtracker.com and GoodKeywords.com can help you with this. Taking the time to plan correctly in the beginning will pay off well in the long term.