When selecting a domain name for your business, you need to think carefully about your business objectives. You can select a domain name that is unique and that does not relate to anything specific to your business with the objective of building the name into a separate identifiable brand linked to your business. Examples of this are numerous: Google, E-Bay, Yahoo, etc. If you elect to go this route, it can be difficult, time-consuming and expensive to build a separate brand for your business although it could pay off in spades in the long run. Moreover, until the brand recognition is there, you will not have the benefit of the ease of recognition and recall link to your business as you would with a simple and descriptive domain. Thus, if you hope to catch the interest of passersby, whether on a billboard, for sale sign, etc., and have the benefit of recall linked to your business later, this is less likely to occur until you have built up recognition of the linkage between your unique brand name and your business.    

 

Another alternative is to select a descriptive domain name that effectively describes your business and is easy to recognize and recall. There are several rules of thumb in this regard. Ideally, your domain name should (i) be descriptive or relate to your business, (ii) consist of as few words as possible, (iii) not include hyphens or other symbols, and (iv) have a “.com” TLD. If you do not use words that are descriptive or relate to your business, you are going to lose the natural link between consumers and what they associate as your business. Similarly, if you have too many words in your domain name, you begin to lose the ease of recall and recognition. Likewise, if your domain name has hyphens in it or is not a “.com” TLD passersby and consumers may not easily recall it with accuracy and may, as a consequence, wind up visiting your competitor’s site if their domain does not have a hyphen in it or ends in .com and not some other TLD.   Following these rules of thumb can help generate on-line interest from passersby or consumers who may only give a fleeting glance to the name of your website. This is particularly true in businesses where outdoor signs, billboards, flyers and even business cards are part of the standard marketing tools (e.g., in the real estate business).

 

Independent of the ease of recall and recognition benefit, selecting a descriptive keyword domain name with a “.com” TLD can enhance your prospects for type-in or direct navigation traffic on the internet. Type-in traffic consists of traffic to your website that comes from consumers who bypass the search engine process and simply type in the subject matter they are looking for in the web browser bar (often followed by “.com”). Some analysts say that as much as 15% of all web traffic is type-in traffic.

  

In the perfect world, you would combine the brand concept with a descriptive domain(s) so that your business is the enterprise that becomes associated with the descriptive terms. If the descriptive terms you are considering are utilized in multiple iterations by many players in your industry, this will not work as it dilutes the benefit of “branding” and ease of recall and recognition by risking confusion across multiple similar names. An example of this would be in the context of some real estate-related domain names: (e.g., CityXRealEstate.com, CityXRealty.com, CityXProperty.com, CityXRealProperty.com, CityXRealtors.com, CityXRealEstateAgents.com, CityXRealEstateAgent.com, CityXRealtyProperties.com, etc., etc.). On the other hand if you select descriptive terms that are simple and adequately descriptive of your business but are not part of an overcrowded space, then you will have achieved your goal and avoided the potentially dilutive effect on ease of recognition and recall of multiple similar iterations. There are relatively few domain names that possess these qualities although I am aware of some examples that would allow for regional, national or international branding in the real estate-related space such as www.AtlantaHousing.com and www.CanadaHousing.com (the latter of which is owned by my company, GCS International Consulting). By owning domains such as these you effectively own the distinct “Housing” brand for the destination in question – which would be ideal for someone in a real estate, rental, home mortgage or other housing-related business in these locations – while at the same time avoiding the overcrowded “real estate/real estate agent/realtor/realty" domain name space. Selecting a domain of this sort allows you to capitalize on the ease of recognition and recall given the descriptive nature of the name and capture type-in traffic while simultaneously allowing you to develop your distinct brand without just being another participant in an overcrowded space of businesses with domains that are difficult to distinguish. 

 

 

 

*   The author of this article is the founder and president of GCS International Consulting, an international business and strategic advisory firm based in Minnesota, that also owns one of the world’s largest portfolios of international “Housing” brand websites and domain names (see WorldHousing.info and related websites). Mr. Smith can be reached at info@worldhousing.info.