How Your Domain Name Attracts Customers
In today’s world, a website is one of the fastest ways of attracting attention to your business. And the first step to setting up a website is choosing a good domain name.
Somehow, there hasn’t been enough emphasis placed on choosing a domain name that attracts the right customers, so allow me to expound on this subject with some tips you can put to immediate use for your next website or blog.
1. Choose A Descriptive Domain
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.
eg. If your name is Lisa Barstow and you run a hair salon, get a domain like lisashairsalon.com instead of lisabarstow.com. Unless you already famous, or want to become famous, your own name isn’t the best option.
Also, shorter is better because it’s easier to remember. It’s also easier for them to type, with less chance of spelling mistakes.
2. Select A Keyword-Rich Domain Name
Most websites rely on the search engines to a certain degree for getting visitors. If you use your keywords in your domain name, it can help with getting ranked higher in the search results.
If you’d done the research and used these customer-specific keyword phrases in your domain name, more than likely your website will be listed on the very first page of the search engines, outranking your competitors because you had exercised due diligence where keyword-rich domain names were concerned.
There are plenty of other things you’ll need to do to get good rankings in the search engines, but your domain name sets the foundation for everything else. Also, avoid using dashes in your domain even if it makes it easier to find a keyword-rich name. Hyphens are believed to hurt your rankings in some search engines.
3. Do You Really Need .com?
Yes and no. You could use other extensions like .net, .biz or .info but it’s not the best choice. Everybody knows .com but if your site uses something else, you’re going to have to market it a lot harder to get the correct extension in people’s minds. And if someone else already has the .com version, they’ll probably get a lot of traffic from people looking for you.
How would you like your potential customers to end up on your competitor’s client list thanks to the time and money you spend on marketing?
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.