Abbreviations Make Bad Domain Names

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Almost every week I come across business owners who are committing what I consider to be one of the cardinal sins of domain selection – choosing an abbreviation.

For example: www.xyzpl.com.au or www.wxyz.com

Unless you’re IBM, this can be a very costly strategy for a few reasons:

1. Abbreviations are meaningless, especially to people who don’t know you. Does BBS.com stand for Brisbane Baking Supplies or Boat Building Services?
2. Because abbreviations lack meaning, they tend to be harder to remember… for your prospects and clients.
3. Keyword-rich domain names assist your organic SEO results, both directly (domain names are a ranking factor for search engines) and indirectly (keyword-rich domain names lend themselves to keyword-rich inbound links)
4. Relevant domain names dramatically increase your Google AdWords (and other PPC) Click Through Rates and conversion results. In some cases we have seen different domain names outperform others by up to 400% when tested in AdWords ads (like in this online marketing case study, for example).

So what do you do if you’re already using an abbreviation as a domain name? My advice is to seriously consider changing, or at a bare minimum investigate other domain names to “park” over your existing domain name.

That will allow you to at least test new ideas in Google AdWords and gauge response – then if the results justify it, consider a complete change.

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