Tips for Picking a Domain Name
Picking a domain name for your website is an important decision. Your domain name is how people are going to locate your business online, and can have a large effect on how potential customers, and search engines, view your site. Here are some things to consider when choosing a domain name.
- Keep it short and simple, and make it match your business name as closely as possible. Let’s say you want to create a website for your restaurant, Ron’s Pizza. The ideal domain name would be RonsPizza.com. It’s easy to remember, has only one possible spelling, matches the name of your business and tells customers exactly what you do. Now compare that with something like BestPizzainNewJersey.com. There are several problems here: the domain name is long, vague, and does not indicate your specific business. Potential customers looking for Ron’s Pizza might miss it.
- Avoid confusion. When picking a domain name, you want to avoid confusion about who you are and what you do. The example above mentioned pizza, but didn’t mention whose pizza it was. A domain name like RonsofNJ.com would have the opposite problem: I know you’re Ron, but not what your business does. You also want to avoid confusion with other businesses. If there are three other businesses in your area with a similar or identical name to Ron’s Pizza, you need to think about how you will stand out, and may even want to consider a name change. Having a unique name will make it easier for your customers to find you, and easier to rank higher in Google searches.
- Try to get a .com extension. Although there are now hundreds of domain name extensions, also called top-level domains (TLDs), .com is still far and away the most common. As of June 2016, 49.2% of all global websites used a .com extension. Simply for the fact that it is so commonly used and well known, it is important to get it for your new site. It will lend your site a sense of credibility that a novelty extension like .pizza will not. If getting a .com extension for your site is not possible, try getting a .net extension, which accounts for 4.7% of websites in the same survey.
Why You Should Use Google Domains
Once you have an available domain name picked out, the next important decision is which domain service to go with. We strongly recommend Google Domains, which we use for all of our websites. It offers the high quality you would expect from a Google product as well as:
- Unparalleled phone support with no long wait times.
- A low price of only $12 a year for domain registration.
- Free domain privacy, an important service other companies charge for.
- Simple one-click business email setup through Gmail. Business emails cost $5 per month per user.
Contact JSMT Media today for all your website needs.
