How many times have you heard this one, “All the good names are taken, so don’t even try!” Sure, all the good easy to guess domain names are already taken, but do you think that stopped the liked of Google (who had heard of a GOOGLE before then?) or Endless.com (Amazon’s smash-hit online footwear site)? Of course it didn’t – they recognized that Marketing 101 comes into play with domain names; mainly it’s the brand that matters! If you have a good, memorable brand the rest will fall into place.
The first question you have to ask yourself when thinking of a domain name for your site is what is your site about – what are you trying to sell or provide information on? If you are creating your 50th site about Viagra, then, let’s face it, the domain name really doesn’t matter – we all know what we are after here and the domain is a “throw away”. Choose whatever you fancy!
For the rest of us, we need to ask ourselves some questions so that our domain name not only helps promote our product or service, but also helps us with SEO strategy.
Realize that traffic comes from everywhere. There was a time when traffic came from two places: a search engine or someone typing it in the address bar manually. Today, traffic comes from hundreds of places with more being added every day. Places such as Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia just to name a few. One of the best ways to get traffic to your site is to have someone mention you on a social networking site!
People can’t write about you or recommend you if they can’t remember you. Here is where our first tip comes in: make the domain name memorable, and writeable! Avoid hard to spell words or domain names that run on and on and on and …. Make it easy for people to find and link to you!
It’s all about the brand. As we talked about before, you have to have a branding strategy. However, many website owners only think about the primary brand and give up too easily when they find out that all the good names are already being used. Sometimes you have to go with a soft brand. Think about Microsoft’s Hotmail – the soft brand here is “mail”, with their own branding “hot” added in. You will find that you can often have great success with soft branding your domain, especially if you are in a crowded market already.
Just like real estate, good domain names go up in value. Most companies already know this, but their domain name is an asset just as much as the desk and chairs sitting in the office are. Good domain names appreciate over time as the value and familiarity of them go up. A good, well thought out domain name will only help in this area. You want people to not only visit your website, but eventually to wish they could have your domain name as well!
Exact Match Helps. It’s no secret that people click on the links that are not ads more often than they do when they are ads. So when you have a domain name that is an exact match to a query about a product or service you offer that is pure gold. Google and the other search engines give extra “credit” to domains who match queries directly, helping promote them to the top of the list. It’s essentially free PPC!
What it all boils down to in the end is that picking a domain name is a daunting task, but when you apply marketing and SEO techniques you can help build your business from day one instead of having to rebrand it down the road. Take time to investigate possible domain names and make sure they help you with your marketing strategy both now and in the future.
Mon, May 11, 2009
Business Tactics