Choosing the Name
Your Company Name is a great place to start, but often company names bare no obvious relationship with what the company does or sells.
There are many company names that do very well as domain names, but that’s usually because the company has made a name for itself using other marketing strategies, like television or radio advertising.
These can lead to organic referred visits after searches for the company name.
It’s probably not the best choice for you if your company and your public brand are different.
The SEO power of a company name is almost absolute unless your company name is something very common, so it’s very likely that if your company is searched for, your website will appear in the top of search results.
Your Brand should probably be your top choice, but that advice may differ from business to business.
The brand, by its nature, is something that is assumed will be publicly presented and advertised through many channels, not necessarily just online.
Brand name domains are often great SEO tools to get lots of organic referrals, but this only works if people already know the brand and use a search engine, or simply type your domain name into their browser. But these are two very different things: The former means they have heard about your brand but need to search for you – it gets recorded in Google Analytics as a search referral. The latter means they don’t even need to search, they know the exact address already, and it’s recorded in Google Analytics as a direct entry.
If the brand is new, and you plan to gain traction on the web alone, you might need to think about other promotional strategies like buying paid search impressions via Google AdWords, at least until your brand starts picking up organic referrals.
Exact Match Domains are the third possible choice. EMDs are domain names that match against actual search queries being made in search engines.
If someone searches for “cheap used cars” and you are in the business of selling low cost used cars, then this is an appropriate EMD for your business.
EMDs used to be very powerful in gaining traffic from matched searches, but they no longer have the great power that they used to have.
EMDs that are highly commercially focused now most likely attract a slight starting penalty from search engines like Google. In other words, you may start your website with what will seem like a negative SEO effect until such time as you can prove your website is worthy of rank.
If you plan to rely entirely on the commercial match of your EMD as your complete SEO strategy, then it’s not likely to work out well.
Another problem you need to anticipate is that if you plan to sell something other than just low cost used cars, like boats for example, the domain name will have no SEO power for that.
EMDs provide the greatest SEO power when your website content also has strong organic SEO performance. So if you plan to select an EMD domain name, be prepared to invest time and effort in making your website content rich and highly optimised for search.
You may need to hire an SEO services provider for help in making that possible, or to at least map out a workable SEO strategy for you.
Feature Matched domains are my final example.
These are domains that are a little bit like brands because they need to become well known before they generate much in the way of organic referrals.
An air conditioning company called ‘ABC Air Conditioning’ for example, might choose a domain name like keepcool.com. It’s not their company name, probably not their brand name and is not a commercial EMD.
Instead, the name becomes their online sub-brand.
Depending on what is selected, these might provide some SEO power in that they might match or partially match to commercial search phrases.