Plenty of people believe that a domain name is just an address for their website but in actuality it’s a lot more than that. Domain names have an immense impact on the amount of traffic your site gets, the click through rate, offline advertising, etc. So with that being said, given below are 5 tips for choosing a domain name.
Your domain name should represent your brand. It should sound like one too that’s why when someone says it, it shouldn’t sound generic. Having that said, hyphens and numbers should be avoided as they make a domain name sound vague. McDonalds.com in this case is a great example because it is way ahead of generic domain names like “McDonalds-order.com” or “Mc-Donalds.com”.
You may think that why do people need to pronounce your domain name when they will only be typing it? Well, how do you expect your visitors to remember your domain name, if they can’t even pronounce it? The thing about pronounceable names is that our brain finds it easy to remember them as opposed to names which are not easy to pronounce.
Let’s say that you have successfully built an amazing website with kickass content, but you are not getting a lot of traffic merely because people misspell your domain name. This way all your hard work will go down the drain. Therefore make sure that your domain name is easy to pronounce.
While it’s better to keep your domain name short for simplicity and to make it easy to remember, making it so short that it doesn’t make sense is wrong. For example if you have a travel blog and you go for the domain name “www.TravelAd.com” instead of “www.Traveladventures.com” just to keep it short then you are just going to lose your visitors.
It is always a good idea to go after .com extension because it has a lot of credibility associated with it. People may get tempted to go after hip and new extensions like “.me” or “.pro” but “.com” is still the most used and easiest to remember extension.
However if you can’t get “.com” then go for an extension like “.org” or “.net” and then plan on acquiring “.com” later if it isn’t owned by a big brand.
Having keywords in your domain name can be beneficial for you but don’t make it your priority to add exact match phrases in your domain name because that can hurt your brand.
Google can catch such tactics so an exact match won’t help your site get a good rank on search engines so this tactic should be avoided.
We hope that these 5 tips will help you choose a better domain name in the future. If you have anything to add then feel free to share it with us.