Your web address, or URL, is what people type in their browsers to get to your website; it helps them and search engines identify you on the internet. So, as you can guess, it is a pretty crucial element to nail down properly when you launch your business.
Surprisingly, many businesses do not give the URL the consideration and attention it deserves and may suffer for it. You absolutely should. Why? Because your web address is as important as your brand, and as anyone knows, branding is vital to your business’s lifeblood, with many companies allocating vast resources just for branding. A design that is memorable and easy to remember, conveys what the business does, and helps your brand stand out a little, is what you want to aim for. A web address does the same thing and perhaps plays an even more important role, considering its impact on SEO. You want to get it absolutely right, and that is what this guide is going to help you with.
Get It Right the First Time
Getting a winning URL is perhaps even more important than creating that bang-on brand. If a brand doesn’t meet your expectations, or the final result just isn’t it, you can always redesign it with no real consequences or complications. But changing the web address once you are done with the domain registration can be much more risky and chaotic. You can damage your SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, which is basically a process that decides how quickly you come up in the search results when somebody types in your name or something similar, and it can be a pain asking other websites to change your domain name on their sites. Take time to consider carefully, ask your partners, employees, or friends what they think, and then make a final decision.
Why Get It Right?
If you have to change it, there are, of course, steps you can take to soften some of the damage, but even then, issues may persist. It may take quite some time to bring your organic traffic back, and your brand awareness is pretty much back to square one as you try to tell your customers that you now have a new name, which makes it somewhat of a new identity as well. You will also have to restart your whole social media presence from scratch, along with resetting your search engine presence, and as everyone knows, that can be an absolutely brutal time and stress. Once you have changed your domain name, you will also need to get new names for all your branding, emails, and other marketing materials. So it is best to just avoid all that headache and make sure you get it right the first time. Take some time to research suitable domain names before you make a decision.
.com
Stick with the classic. When you are in the final steps of making your brand name, it would be advisable for you to check if the matching domain name with the “.com” extension is available. Yes, nowadays you have access to fancier top-level domains, like “.co.uk”, “.blog”, “.shop”, and so on. It will be better for you if you stick with the tried and trusty classic “.com” extension. There are a few reasons for this. Visitors almost always default to typing .com in the URL bar after the domain name, and a mistype could lead them to an error page, or, much worse, land them on a competitor's page. Also, most smartphones nowadays have a default .com after you type in the web address, so you stand to lose a lot of potential traffic if you decide on anything other than .com. With that being said, if .com isn’t available for you, you shouldn’t lose any sleep over it either, as extensions like .org, .net, and the like are also great options and are pretty popular with the populace.
Short, Memorable, on-Brand
Your domain name should be short snappy, memorable, and on-brand. A short domain name is easier to say and share with people, even vocally. It is also a lot more memorable, as an overly long and complicated URL won’t win you any favors with your potential customers. Furthermore, your domain name should also be your brand name. Imagine if Adidas had a domain called adidasshoes.com. Not only would that sound inauthentic and generic, almost like a fake site, but also be limiting. So, match them.
Keywords
Be smart with your keywords because of two things. First, search engines, like Google, Bing, and so on, no longer require you to have your main or exact match keyword in your web address for it to rank higher, as the rankings have become a bit more nuanced than that now. Also, stuffing your URL with keywords may actually backfire, and you may end up penalized, on top of people equating such URLs with spammy, untrustworthy, and maybe even scamming businesses. Secondly, in some cases, having a keyword that is relevant to your domain name can be helpful, especially if it is part of your brand name in the first place, as the keyword becomes the brand, so to speak.
Easy to Pronounce and Spell
When people interact with a business or brand they like, they talk about it and tell others about it via texting or mentioning it in conversations; basically, the business’s name comes up a lot. So what would happen if the name was confusing to spell or hard to pronounce? What if it has a hyphen, or some words or letters that have been replaced by a number? How would they convey that verbally? If they can’t, your business loses huge marketing, branding, and organic SEO opportunities. Don’t let it get to that point, and choose a domain and brand name that are no-brainers to spell and pronounce.
Your web address makes up a huge part of your business’s potential customer attraction and is something you absolutely want to make sure you get right. Hopefully, you now have an idea of what you are looking for, what to do, and what not to do.
