Choosing a Domain Name

When you decide to build a website, choosing your domain name is more complicated than you think. You can obviously choose something like www.yourbusinessname.ca, but it may be smart to register other names as well to generate more traffic to your website.

Choosing a domain name: example

Some time ago I was asked to build a website for a yoga teacher in Dublin. She just started and didn't have a name for her business yet. Therefore, choosing a domain name like www.yourbusinessname.ie wasn't really possible. Instead, I decided to choose a name based on customer searches on Google and found a suitable name: www.yogaclassesdublin.com. Since this was a popular search term, the website immediately ranked as one of the top 4 websites when performing a search for yoga classes in dublin. In other words, the Google ranking for this website increased significantly due to the domain name. Without any further marketing - and without spending a lot of money - the website resulted in an increase of student signups.

Yourbusinessname.ca

Here are some advantages of choosing your business name as a domain name.

• Your customers know this name and may type it into their browsers without using a search engine.
• Legal advantages: if your company name is Google, you are entitled to use the domain name google.ca. Google's competitors may have trouble registering google.ca.
• Your business name may say a lot about the field in which you operate, or may have emotional value.

Popular search terms as domain name

As I showed in the example, this may be a great boost for your page rank. Some advantages are:

• Higher listing on the search engines for that particular search term.
• The search term domain name may be more descriptive than your business name.
• You may need less advertising, which leads to cost benefits.

The best of both

If you don't mind spending money for two domain names, and you don't mind promoting both domain names online, you could consider a combination of the two approaches. In this case, you could use yourbusinessname.ca as your core domain, and use popularsearchterm.ca to promote this domain name. One way would be to redirect from popularsearchterm.ca to yourbusinessname.ca, but you can also create two websites with similar content (and maybe do some A/B testing).

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