How to choose a domain name
Cotswold Web • 17 March 2020
If you are about to launch your business online, you will need a domain name. The domain name is the bit after https:// or www. – so in this example https://tewkesburyconservatories.co.uk – the tewkesburyconservatories.co.uk bit is the domain name.
Your domain name is a really key element of your website and your business. It’s a visitor’s first impression of your company, which affects your SEO and helps define your brand online. So making the right choice from the start could be make or break.
Your chosen domain name should be short, easy to spell, easy to type and easy to remember. It will also need to be unique to your business, which isn’t always easy in a crowded market.
Keep it relevant
It sounds obvious, but your domain name must relate to your business.
If your company is called Tewkesbury Conservatories, there’s no point giving your website an entirely different domain name (for example, if your preferred name has already been taken) because your business won’t rank highly on search engines, like Google.
You can check whether a domain name is already in use by using Nominet (https://www.nominet.uk). If your chosen name is taken, Nominet will also tell you who it is registered with and advise on alternative domains that are available.
There is a chance that your chosen name might be taken, but not actually being used. In this case, you could offer to buy it from the owner. While some high profile domain names will sell for thousands of pounds, many owners will be willing to sell for a fraction of that.
In the case of a domain which is already in use, an alternative is to add the location of your business, so it could be https://fasttaxischeltenham.co.uk
or https://fasttaxisuk.com
Think big
Try to think long-term rather than short-term, so if you see your business expanding beyond Cheltenham in the future, it would make sense to future-proof your domain name by choosing the ‘UK’
rather than the ‘Cheltenham’ option. If you need to change your domain in the future, it will cost money, time and SEO rankings, as well as affecting all of your branding, both on and offline.
To build your brand, it’s preferable to have the same name across your domain and your social networks.
This makes it easier for followers and potential customers to find your business across the web. So take into consideration the availability of your chosen name on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram before committing to your domain.
When considering your domain name, try to use niche keywords that reflect your website. These niche keywords will help improve your SEO – so ‘Tewkesbury’ and ‘conservatories’ work well for a conservatory company located in Tewkesbury, but not so well if the business is actually based in Birmingham.
.com or .co.uk?
The final decision you need to make is choosing your Top Level Domain – that’s the ‘.com’ or ‘.co.uk’ bit of your domain name. The most trustworthy Top Level Domains are either ‘dot com’, which is internationally recognised, and ‘dot co dot uk’, which is good for British businesses.
There are others available, but they are less recognisable and therefore appear less trustworthy to potential customers.
But if you want full control of your domain name and don’t want to lose potential customers to rival businesses, it is sensible to buy both the ‘.com’ and ‘.co.uk’ variants of your domain name. Then you simply need to choose which one you want to use for your site and get the other one to redirect to it, so you don’t lose traffic or customers.
Once you’ve chosen your domain name, you need to go about registering it. You can read about how to do that in our How to register a domain name
post.
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