How to choose a great domain name

Here’s a quick off-the-top-of-my-head article on how to choose a great domain name.

A great domain name is one that:

1. Is easy to remember
2. Is easy to spell
3. Communicates something about what you and how you benefit your clients
4. Produces high response rates in pay-per-click ads and other ads
5. Is credible

But shucks! All the good domain names are taken!

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that “all the good domain names are taken”. With a little thought it’s actually quite easy to come up with a good domain name that is still available.

If you’re a local business, consider a domain name that contains your location such as www.SydneyBookkeeper.com.au [obviously a Sydney-based bookkeeper] or www.JapaneseBrisbane.com [a Brisbane-based Japanese school].

However, if you also deal with clients outside of your area, avoid a location-specific domain name, unless you’re using multiple domain names for different regions or market segments.

.com, .com.au, .biz or???

For Aussie-based businesses, I recommend .com.au domain names. If the .com version is also available then get that too, because people sometimes forget to type the .au on the end.

The cheapest place that I know for registering .com.au domain names is Cheap Domains. At the time of writing it costs $38 for a 2 year .com.au registration (compared with some other companies who provide exactly the same service for $140 or more!).

In general, I recommend that you choose a .com or .com.au domain name. These have the greatest credibility. I recommend against .biz domain names - they have a fly-by-night-pyramid-scheme ring about them.

A dash in your domain name is also OK, such as…

www.marketing-results.com.au

…but avoid too many dashes:

www.ultimate-work-at-home-making-millions-in-your-pajamas-income-scheme.biz

They erode your credibility.

A couple of years ago, there was a search engine benefit to having dashes in a keyword-rich domain name, but this no longer exists. The search engines have become smarter at discerning the individual words within domain names.

Make your domain name speak volumes

A domain name that telegraphs something about your product or service can be a real asset.

For example, my company name is Will International Pty Ltd (yes I know, that normally gets a few chuckles) buy my “trading name” is Marketing Results.

On Adwords, if I split test the display URLs

www.WillInternational.com.au

vs.

www.Marketing-Results.com.au

…the second one produces a significantly higher response. That’s because it communicates a benefit associated with what we do.

I recommend that you test a few domain names against each other before you making your final decision - the right domain name can be worth a bucket to your business, for the reason that it can attract more of the right prospects to your website better than the alternatives.

Your domain name DOESN’T have to be your company name

Many company names don’t make very good domain names. That’s fine - choose another name.

Company names that are acronyms (e.g. www.afgs.com.au) make poor domain names. They don’t communicate anything about what you do and are often hard to remember.

Why did you choose the domain name you did?

If you’ve read this far, why not leave a comment about your domain name and why you chose it? Non-spammy domain names with sensible comments will be left as a backlink to your site.

Bests,

Will

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