Now we all want something cool and creative four our domain name, ie. www.coolandcreative.com.
It is completely natural to want a domain name that is our business name.
However, this does not make sense online, especially if you aren’t yet a household brand like amazon.com. You cannot do this for proper web design and seo. For instance if you have a cookie shop making organic cookies, your name may be Sherri’s cookies. That shop may have the best cookies, and once you make a name for yourself locally, people will associate organic cookies with your brand, Sherri’s Cookies.
When purchasing a domain, you won’t have made a name for your brand online, so you need to work from the customer back. Let the customers pick your domain name. Thus, first you need to find what people are looking for, through your SEO and Keyword Research.
This is the time for a Keyword Analysis to find what folks are commonly searching for, and where they are not being served. Through a Keyword Analysis, you will find the high search terms with low competition that is related to your company. Google gives preference to the domain names that have the keywords people are searching for.
Now, you may be thinking why should I build a name around customers wants and wishes…it’s my company and website and I want to provide the name. You cannot do that online and it’s a dying ideology in general.
The best marketing, sales, business idea is to find out what people want and then provide it for them. That may likely mean changing your product line to suit the demands of your online market. The internet provides a great way to test new ideas and product, ultimately speeding up the process of serving your customers better. See my How Can I Help You post for more on this concept. .
So in our example, we have done a Keyword Analysis and found that there is a low to moderate amount of google inquiries for the term organic cookies, 597 per month. Organic cookies has high competition with advertising and it is a popular term so the domain may not be affordable.
The next step is to I dig deeper and carve out a niche. Sherri tells me that she specializes in organic cookies that are more healthy with wheat-free flours and sugar alternatives. So let’s get more precise in these by saying analyzing the term “Healthy Organic Cookies”.
This along with many other variations have high competition or low search volume, so we will stick with the Organic Cookies term. Your first choice in domain name may be taken. You can buy it for sometimes $50 or sometimes $50,000.
Domain prospectors have bought up almost all of the popular search terms, but that’s ok. If that’s the case you can simple add a couple letters or a hyphen to the domain name to make it cheap again, or to find one that someone hasn’t bought. And that is the case here, organiccookies.com is taken, so we will try variations like myorganiccookies.com, etc until we find a domain at a suitable price.
.com for Best SEO and Web Design
This is your preferred domain name, not “.us “or “.net”. People easily remember “.com” and search engines like Google give preference to .com. Of course you can use .org if you are a non-profit, but otherwise you will mislead customers.
Redirects for SEO and Web Design
You can also redirect a keyword-rich domain name to your non-optimized domain as well. For instance, if you have a site already at sherriscookies.com, then you can keep that site live, while redirecting from or to the myorganiccookies.com to retain the domain preference from the search engines.
Have questions or experience with this? Please post below and we’ll answer promptly.
by Jason Jelonek
