In a digital and hyper-connected world it is important to be easily identified and found. The domain is the gateway for people to your website and forms part of your digital and corporate identity. Choosing the right domain name is important for building your brand identity and your online presence. Let's always keep in mind that branding and domain name go hand in hand. A good choice will help to confer professionalism, to find and visit your website easily and even to position it. That is why we offer you 13 simple tips to choose the best domain for your project.
What is a domain?
The domain name is your Internet address and is composed of the name of your website and an extension (or suffix). A domain is a digital address, the equivalent of a postal address on the Internet. It allows us to type google.com instead of http://216.58.201.131.
Types of domains to choose and strategy: branded domains and EMD domains.
When choosing a domain name it is important to consider what you want to achieve with your website, what your objective is and what audience you want to reach.
When choosing a domain we will respond to a strategy that we have set ourselves. For example, we can aim to enhance our branding, favour the positioning of our business at a local level or attract organic traffic to position ourselves in a sector. Let's look at some examples:
➡ These are brand domains that seek to enhance branding, both at a business and personal branding level.
This type of domains are slower to rank, but if the right steps are taken, they will end up giving a more solid presence. Google looks more and more favourably on this type of domain names and a good choice can be a fundamental pillar of a successful brand.
➡ In addition to brandingdomains, there are also the so-called EMD domains (Exactly March Domain which are those that include the keyword or key phrase within the domain:
These types of domains offer faster ranking, are easier to remember and work especially well in micro-niches. Google will understand if the content of the page corresponds to the domain and will interpret which searches to rank for. On the other hand, the traffic obtained may be less loyal than that of an established brand, and the search engine may also favour brand pages with more authority. It must be taken into account that the use of EMD domains can obey different strategies. For example coworkingsantiago.com seeks to position itself locally as a business, while vuelosbaratos.es aims to target a very specific market niche without making reference to the local.
Tips for choosing the right domain name.
Every day it is more difficult to find an original, attractive and free domain name, but with a little imagination and some good practice guidelines, the operation is sure to be successful. Here are some tips when choosing a domain name.
-
Plan, insert it into your business strategy and use brainstorming techniques. It is very important to get things right from the beginning because changing your domain can have important consequences for your brand image and positioning. Therefore, choosing the domain should be a thoughtful task and inserted in a previous strategy and planning.
-
Choose a shortname. Technically, up to 63 characters can be used, but this is nonsense. It is advisable that a domain name contains between 3 and 12 characters and a maximum of 3 words. Remember that it is more than likely that you are going to use this domain name for your business email addresses, so it should not be endless.
-
Simple and easy to remember. Keep in mind that every person who can remember it is a potential lead. Words with real meaning are easier to remember.
-
Easy to pronounce, understand and spell. It should be easy to refer to and dictate. Here you should take into account who your target audience is. For example, if you are targeting tourists of a specific nationality or real estate investors from a certain country, etc. Ideally, it should not even be necessary to spell it out, but if it is the case, it should be simple and not an awkward and embarrassing exercise for the interlocutors. Avoid words that people tend to misspell.
-
Use only letters if possible. Avoid using numbers and punctuation marks. There are many reasons for this, especially the confusion that numbers and hyphens can cause, or the fact that they are not immediately available on mobile devices. Keep it simple.
-
Avoid capital letters to avoid confusion.
-
Avoid abbreviations and acronyms.
-
Associate your domain with your brand. Brand identity is made up of many factors and elements. The domain is one of these elements and must be in line with the image you want to project. You can use the name of your business, although it is also very common to combine brands with other elements in the name (a keyword). It is also important to maintain coherence with the brand image used in social networks.
-
Include keywords if they fit. Many experts advise you to choose a domain name that has something to do with your activity or that is intuitive. This will help search engines and your visitors to associate you with a specific sector, discovering what your content is. See for example gorisabogados.com, fontaneriaconsa.com or bokehfotografia.com. In the examples, keywords indicating the sector or activity are introduced in a very natural way. However, we should not abuse this practice and inflate our domain too much with keyword. Especially if we think only in SEO terms. Search engines live by showing the user what they are really looking for and that is why the most important thing is always the content of the page, more than any keyword. That is to say, no matter how many keywords you use in the domain of your website, if the page has no value for the user, it will be of no use for positioning.
-
Avoid legal problems. Never try to create confusion with a well-known brand name and avoid copyright infringement. Some trademarked names can get us into undesirable legal conflicts, which also affects variations of the same. If in doubt, you can consult the patent and trademark registers and also the trade name used by your competitors: http://www.oepm.es/es/signos_distintivos/
-
Check the meaning of your domain in other languages if you operate internationally.
-
Choose the right extension for your domain. The domain extension is the final part of the domain, i.e. the part after the dot (e.g. com, org, es, net, info). There are thousands of domain extensions available and choosing the right one for your project is a fundamental part of building a great online presence. It is usually best to use .com, especially for branding or personal branding pages. The .com will position well all over the world and in the collective imagination it is the default extension. This option will also depend on the strategy you have set for your project, because depending on it, it may be more interesting to use geolocalised domain extensions to target potential customers in a certain country. It is even interesting and a good practice to register several extensions to protect your brand by making the others (parked domains) redirect to the main one (for example Iberia has registered iberia.com and iberia.es, but if you type the second one it will redirect you to the first one).
-
It is preferable that the domain is hosted in the same country as the website and the company.
