“What’s in a name?”- I guess the famous dialogue from Shakespeare turns out to be wrong in the business world. A name can represent a lot about an entity. Now imagine the name being changed from Google to Larry Page and Sergey Brin Search Engine Company. Seems difficult to remember, isn’t it? Selecting the website name will be one of the most important decisions that you will ever make in the process of starting a business. More importantly, it will be the name you would mentally verbalize a 100 times a day and hope for it to become a household name in due time. Thus, it requires to be shorter, catchy, and often even made-up.
Before coming to any conclusion, it becomes very important for you to decide whether you want your website’s name or describe your business, or to create a new brand. You can even think of combining both such aspects. Let me elaborate the point for you: Do you want potential customers to know what your business does by its domain name or do you want to create a one-of-a-kind company and brand identity?
How about taking a creative approach?
Make up a word or use a word that has no clear association to your company’s products and services. As a result, this will create a challenge among your potential users not knowing what your company is all about, in terms of the name but it can ultimately be the most powerful asset when it comes to shaping your company’s identity. Look around at the growing list of domains that consist of words that had no meaning pre-internet, names like Google, Yelp, Trivago, Buzzfeed and more. Have you ever heard of these companies, I am pretty sure not! And see where are they now, they have succeeded in becoming household names. Take an example of Amazon, there was a time when Amazon was referred in terms of a massive jungle and today, we always end up thinking of the online superstore first.
Time to think about the descriptive approach
Some of the most effective domain names are the ones which clearly describes what a business does, or what type of content a user will find on the website. For example, visitors to Weather.com, Dictionary.com, and Realtor.com. As the name implies, visitors exactly know what to expect once they reach these online destinations. The only drawback of picking a descriptive domain name is that it becomes quite difficult to come up with a brand identity. I mean although your customers will be able to tell what you are selling but they won’t be able to get a sense of what you are or how your company’s service differs from your competitors. In addition to this, such kind of domains can turn out to be a pigeonhole for your company into only offering what your domain name describes and not emphasizing on what products or services are offered by you.
Website name has to be the best in terms of SEO and marketing
Do you know what is the best thing about creating a new brand with your domain name? It’s more like shaping your identity on an open canvas. While on the negative side, they won’t be able to connect your products and service offerings with your name. Creating a new word may also seem challenging for users to remember and might even require more sophisticated and costly marketing plan in order to generate exposure and educate potential users.
When you have a descriptive domain, keywords are already incorporated which can turn out to be a valuable asset and provide instant free SEO and digital marketing for your website. Earlier, the tactic was considered as one of the most effective ways to improve SEO rankings years ago. But as for now, it has become increasingly less effective as Google’s algorithm has the potential to penalize poor quality or less visited sites, even if their domain name exactly matches search terms.
So what needs to be done?
The best way is to seek help from a reputable web development company or else incorporate the elements of both schools of thought. Of course, it is possible to think of a new brand name that also stimulates a mental image of your products or services and the one which uses some aspects of a descriptive domain naming strategy to create a new brand name.
