The two things to keep in mind when considering a domain name for your business are visibility and branding. The key to success on the internet is being found. You will not be profitable in your online business if people cannot find your website on the search engines even if you have a fancy website with a lot of bells and whistles. What is the way to have your website seen? First think about what keywords customers are searching for when looking for your product or service? Think like your customer. If you are in the plumbing business, appropriate searches may be the keywords "unclog drain" or "fix leaky pipe". Google moves websites to the front of the search page based on relevance. Having the domain name unclogdrain.com or fixleakypipe.com, you would expect to have more visibility than if your website was smithplumbing.com. If you have established your business as Smith Plumbing and people will search Copper sewer pipe for you under that name, it is okay to use the domain name smithplumbing.com, but you need to advertise to have visibility. Once you have determined the keywords that best describe your business, you need to see if the domain name is already taken. I like to use the domain registrar called Go Daddy because they have great deals on purchasing domain names and offer cheap web hosting as well. Use the Go Daddy Domain Search Tool to see if another business already owns a domain name with your keyword. I checked Go Daddy for unclogdrain.com. Someone already owns it. Someone owns fixleakypipe.com as well.. However, fixleakypipes.com was available. I looked on Google to see how many searches "fix leaky pipe" got and found 1,180,000 searches. For "fix leaky pipes" I found 1,580,000 searches. If you specialize in fixing leaky pipes, there are many customers searching for you and you can register this domain name for only 10.69 plus tax for one year. If you have established yourself as Smith Plumbing and are known in your community, it makes sense to get smithplumbing.com. It will be important to keep advertising your business as you have always done so the local community can find you. There is something else you can do. If you specialize in fixing leaky pipes, you may purchase fixleakypipes.com and forward the domain name to your smithplumbing.com website. This way when people type in the keyword "fix leaky pipes" and find your website on page one of Google, they will click on it and get the Smith Plumbing website and you can continue branding your business with the Smith Plumbing brand. Branding is the second important factor in choosing a domain name.. Branding is more expensive than a domain name based on a keyword and takes more effort on your part, but if you want people to identify Smith Plumbing with fixing leaky pipes, you can brand yourself with repeated advertising. Then Smith Plumbing will put into mind when a person gets a leaky pipe.. The example I gave is for a local brick and mortar business. The same principles apply for a strictly online business. I recommend the dot com domain name. Most businesses choose the .com domain name first for each keyword.. Select a domain name where you can purchase all of the options such as dot com, dot net, and dot org. If someone has the .com name and you buy the .net name, it can lead to confusion. To prove to you how powerful this concept is, I started a website for Italian Folk Music ten years ago. The website is www.italianfolkmusic.com. I have made few changes tothe site over the past decade. It still ranks as one of the top web searches for Italian Folk Music.
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