URL Optimization Part 2: Domain Names

Choosing an SEO-friendly domain name

Keep in mind the following factors when picking a domain name for our own website:

Brandability

The domain name of our business’s website and the brand name of the business itself are interrelated. They should, ideally, be the same. Users typically recognize a business by its brand name. It’s how they find us online and share our name with other potential customers.

For example, Ferrari is a well-known car manufacturer. Typing ferrari.com on the address bar should take us to its online website, and it does! Imagine how difficult it would be for users to find the Ferrari website if it owned the domain name latestsportscar.com instead of ferrari.com!

Short, succinct words that may or may not have a meaning, like “Google”, “Amazon”, “Yelp, “Uber” make excellent brand names for big businesses.

If our business is new and we want the domain name to explain what it is about, we can still do so while keeping it brandable. If we make and deliver burgers, for instance, burgerstop.com is a brandable name for our website. At the same time, potential customers will get a fair idea of what the website offers even before visiting it. However, orderburgersonline.com is not a brandable domain name.

Our domain name is brandable if:

• It is unique

• It stands out among competitors

• It is short

• It can be easily memorized

Name length

Go for short domain names. The shorter the better. Shorter domain names are easy to type, easy to remember, and easy to share. Short names also mean that more of the URL is visible in the SERP when shortened to fit in the window.

Notice how the most popular companies have short domain names, like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Bing, Amazon, eBay, and more.

Uniqueness

The last thing we want is for our domain name to be confused with that of an already established website. Not only does it jeopardize our brandability and the customer’s trust in our brand, but it also raises concerns for trademark infringement. The company whose domain name we are causing confusion can attempt to take legal action against us. Knowingly purchasing and using a domain name that includes a trademarked term with bad faith intent is called domain squatting, and the U.S. Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act offers protection to the trademark owners against it.

Easy to remember and type

Choose a domain that’s easy to remember and easy to type. More users are likely to land on apple.com than aextzphonesz.com. That’s because the latter domain is difficult to pronounce, difficult to remember, and just as hard to type.

We don’t want a website that potential customers find hard to reach. Consider if the domain name will be easy to recall and type into the address bar for our customers. Consider if the name will be easy to pronounce, spell and share with friends.

Imagine someone telling a friend, “I know this great website we can order phones from… I just can’t remember what it’s called.” This would be incredibly unfortunate.

Certain letters make names hard to spell. We may want to avoid q, p, x, and z. Double letters also often cause problems.

If people are likely to misspell our domain name, all that hard-earned traffic is lost. Most users won’t spend much time searching for a website they only partly remember. If they can’t reach us in the first few attempts of typing the possible spellings into Google, they’ll likely give up.

Hyphens and numbers

Hyphens and numbers in domain names fall in the category of hard to remember and type. Moreover, they may make it look like a spam website. It’s simple, dog243supplies.com doesn’t sound like an authentic brand. At the same time, it’s not as easy to get to as dogsupplies.com.

We may be inclined to choose a domain name called dog-supplies.com if dogsupplies.com is already taken. In this case, our potential customers are likely to forget the hyphen in the name and reach our competitor even if they were looking for us!

Keywords in domain name

Including keywords in the domain name offers many benefits. It helps users make some sense of the website even before they get to it. If we own a website called pupfood.com, our audience will know what our website is about and whether they’re interested in what we offer. According to Google, it also improves the chances of our site appearing in the SERPs for related searches [6].

We may ask why Google, Amazon, and Apple have domain names completely unrelated to what they do. These are well-known brands; people recognize them immediately. They don’t need to support their domain names with keywords. However, small businesses and startups can benefit from the relatability that keywords bring to domain names.

While keyword inclusion can help, don’t overdo it with exact match phrases. If we sell dog supplies, for example, a domain name like dogplanet.com sounds good, but a domain name like buydogsuppliesonline.com does not. Keyword-stuffed domain names like the latter sound spammy, and users will try to avoid it. Instead, try to include broad keywords, and avoid long tails.

Location

If we run a local business and don’t plan on expanding, we can benefit from including the location in our domain name. It helps target customers of a particular area and limit traffic from areas where we don’t operate. For example, if we offer catering services and are based in Chicago, a domain name like chicagocatering.com will tell customers what we offer and where we offer it at first look in the SERPs.

Domain name generator

Over 120,000 domains are registered on the web every day. When we start searching for available domains, we’ll find that all the good domains are already taken. That’s where a domain name generator can help us come up with new ideas. NameCheap offers an excellent domain name generator tool where we can enter keywords, append suffixes and prefixes and make other adjustments to automatically generate a list of domain name ideas.

We don't have to purchase the domain name from these services. Once we find an available domain name of our choice, we can choose a registrar of our choice to buy it.

Test your knowledge

Choose the best answer for the following question.