What Makes a Good Small Business Domain Name?

How do you choose an effective domain name for a small business website?  In general you want your website domain name to be easy to remember, conceptually linked to your brand and easy to type correctly.

Way back when I started my business, I just tacked on “.com” to my business name and then tried to buy it on godaddy.com.  It wasn’t available.  After considering the .net version, I decided to include the “inc.” of my corporate name and bought www.kmpmarketinginc.com.   Not an easy URL to remember or type correctly.

Today, I would make other choices.  In fact, I would probably purchase a domain name before I named my business!  So if you are in the process of naming your business and/or choosing a domain name for your website, consider the following tips to choose a strong small business domain name:

5 tips for choosing an effective small business domain name:

1. Shorter is better than longer. Longer URLs are harder to remember and offer more chances for typos.

2. Include a keyword in your domain name.  Since I am a marketing consultant, I wanted marketing to be in the name of my company and in the domain name for my website.

3. Avoid hyphens, underscores and plurals. Confusing and easy to forget.

4. Use a 301 redirect so you can be found whether people type “www.” or not. Your Webmaster will understand this direction. But basically people can find my website whether they type in “www.kmpmarketinginc.com” or just “kmpmarketinginc.com”.

5. Consider purchasing alternatives: .net, .org, .biz., mobi etc. if available. I prefer .com for business domains, but purchasing your domain name with various endings is a fairly inexpensive way to prevent competitors from diverting your website traffic.

I suggest reading the inspiration for this week’s blog at Rohit Bhargava’s blog titled: 6 Pitfalls To Avoid When Choosing A Domain Name. Two I particularly liked were:

7. Don’t automatically use your business name.

(I could have used this advice earlier).  One personal testament to this one is that there is not a chance I could remember or spell correctly www.rohitbhargava.com !  But I did remember  www.influentialmarketingblog.com. (you can get to blog from both addresses).

8.  Look at the URL typed without spaces & caps.

“So if your small business…is called “The Books Exchange” – if you register that name online (www.thebooksexchange.com), you inadvertently just gave your site a whole new meaning”.  So true!

BTW…Rohit Bhargava teaches Global Communications at my alma mater Georgetown University, and is an author and international speaker…So I will definitely remember his name in the future!

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