First impression is the key; if you give someone a bad first impression then you are definitely loosing lots of business. Your domain name will be the key to give a great first impression to make viewers curious enough to check out your website.
What are the things that will make your domain name impressive?
- Sound, length, and pronunciation
- Should give an idea about the product
- Must be easy to remember
The combination of these three parts will give you lots of
- Web traffic
- Sales
- Recommendations
Therefore, you do not have the option of taking this part lightly. When choosing a domain name you must focus on three major factors to get a great and effective domain name.
- Psychological Factors
- SEO Factors
- Technical Factors
1-Psychological Factors
No matter how high the quality of your product, you cannot sell much of it if you do not focus on the psychology of your audiences. You must have idea about what they want, how they think, what they do, and what they do not like. Check the below areas to get a better idea:
Easy to Remember:
There are lots of bookmarking services or apps to save the desired URL but still people use their own memory. They memorize the most popular brand web address in their minds and visit the site by directly typing the link in the browser. Therefore, your domain name should be easy to remember. The more people can remember your site the more sales you can get from them. Amazon.com is one of the examples of memorable domain names… Just think if the site’s URL would be amazonclickbuysell.com, then how many of you can still remember the site. (I just gave it as an example)
Make it Short
Business is not a one-day event that after that day will be over. A business is a lifetime event; you can start a small business by yourself, but you must have to have a long-term plan and strategy. Who knows, the business could be one of the niche dominators one day. Just go back 16 years, no one thought at that time that Google will be the number 1 search engine in the world. So prepare yourself to achieve this big milestone.
As a brand, you will have to include your domain name in various areas like
- Text Advertisements
- Social Media
- Press
- Bill Boards
- Banners
- Visiting Cards
Therefore, a short domain name is always the best one to use in all areas I’ve mentioned above. It also has big advantages in word to mouth marketing too.
2-SEO Facts:
Should give the idea about primary keyword:
You don’t have so many options open to influence people to click your search engine result. So it is very important that your domain name seems very smart, and should give them a good idea what the site is about, and what kind of product they can get from there. Therefore, it is good that you put your targeted keyword (broad keyword) in your domain name to get maximum attention from your domain. Additionally, it will help you make your site search engine friendly and will also have some advantages for higher rankings.
Avoid Dropped Domains
A search engine like Google is not in the same position it was 2 years ago. During that lapsed time, they have had so many updates to organize their search engine results. They have Panda update for low quality content and have updates against low quality sites with exact match domains. In addition, they have penguin update against webmasters who perform spammy and unethical SEO. As a result, many people have lost their businesses. It is really very difficult to recover those sites and get the ranks back. Consequently, most webmasters stopped working on those sites and have not renewed those domains. So those domains have been released for re-registration. Nevertheless, it is not a great option to buy those domains that had been flagged by Google. You should avoid those domains.
You can still use dropped domain, because not all of them were dropped due to search engine updates.
Domain Auctions
You can get many premium domains at auctions. There are people who bought those domains in past and will sell those now because those domain seem currently very popular. There are some important factors needed for consideration when buying a domain from an auction. I will write a post about these factors by next few weeks.
3-Technical Facts:
Dot-com Extension:
You just heard about a popular email-marketing brand called aweber. What will be the first thing you will type on browser? Aweber.com? Yes, you will type aweber dot com. Most other people just think like you and I and they will do the same thing. So now if you have a domain called aweber.net then it will lose a good number of traffic for just .net extension. So when buying the domain always focus on dot-com extension.
Avoid Hyphen:
By using a hyphen, you are just reducing your brand’s reputation. You don’t need to believe me, just do a search through Google, Alexa, or any other tools and check the most popular websites on the web, and tell me, had they used hyphens at all? Prothom Alo is a leading newspaper in Bangladesh. Their domain is prothom-alo.com and they used a hyphen. But I have found a lot of people who typed prothomalo.com and found a non existing website. So you always have to give priority of the human psychology and nature. What they type, what they feel, and what they do.
Other Extensions
It is always a great advantage if you buy other common extension of your domain to reduce misleads. Though it is not recommended if you have dot-com domain but it will be a big advantage if you buy other common extensions too.
Singular vs. Plural
Hairclip and Hairclips, seems almost similar, suppose you are the owner of hairclip.com, do you not think that you have a huge chance of losing traffic for hairclips.com just for some minor typing mistake. Yes, you will. So if you have the option you should buy both domains and redirect to the most popular one.
Avoid Numeral Substitutions
In today’s world people really love to use shortcuts. They love to write 4 instead of four, 2 instead of two. But in case of domain they always type four instead of 4, so when choosing the domain avoid numeral substitutions.
Brandable
At last chose a domain that has something for branding. Does the name have something different and attractive? Is it smart and effective? All of these factors can really help you to select an impressive domain name.
It is not necessary that you strictly follow each point I have mentioned. There are brands on the web that are doing well by avoiding some of the points from the above list. Nevertheless, from my experiences I can say by focusing on the mentioned points you will definitely be ahead of many of your competitors.
Have a profitable week 🙂
