What's in a Name??
Part 1 - Your Reputation, Domains, and Marketing - by Jeff Stolarcyk
Your domain name is the most powerful piece of branding your store has on the Web!
A strong, recognizable domain name for your business can bring even more organic traffic to your site. A poor domain name can prevent surfers from ever finding your site.
Show the Engines Who You Are!
Include keywords or phrases in your domain name to increase high natural search engine rankings. What makes you unique from the competition? What’s important to your industry or exemplifies your approach? Then evaluate your choices.
Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool is a great, streamlined resource for investigating search volume. If I’m starting a blog about my favorite pretzels, I could type in phrases like “pretzel blogger”, “pretzel blogs”, and maybe even just “pretzels” on the off-chance that the name is available.
The phrase “pretzels” has an average search volume of about 165,000 queries each month. The bad news is that our other terms don’t generate any search volume at all - they’re not even on the list.
Our best-performing choice - Pretzels.com - is parked. These “parked domains” are registered but land on pages without useful content. Most fill their sites with ads to cash in on direct traffic coming into the site in error. Finding a high-traffic keyword to incorporate into your domain is a quick and efficient way to gain traffic. For instance, SoftPretzelRecipes.com would be a good choice if it ties into the theme of your site.
If you’re stumped on domain name suggestions, check out SnapItNow.com for a comprehensive list of variations on the keywords you want to pursue.
Name Checking
Just because a domain is available now doesn’t mean that someone didn’t previously ruin its reputation with the search engines. The Internet (as the kids say) never forgets and a new store can suffer from a previously banned or blacklisted domain. Perform proactive domain detective work.
The WayBack Machine can show you old versions of a website, indexed by date. Check to see if they’re link farms or pages with spam-filled, malicious code. Search engine indexes penalize the latter. The process of getting re-indexed can be long and painful, so avoid these domains wherever possible.
Redirected Domains - The 411 on 301s
If an available domain name resembles your site, don’t leave it for someone else! Pointing multiple domains at your website is a wise tactic for attracting more direct traffic. Registering alternate top-level domains - TLDs are the suffixes in a URL, the .com, .net, .org or .biz in the site’s address - can salvage repeat shoppers who don’t remember if your site was PretzelBlogger.net or PretzelBlogger.biz.
Registering alternate domains is smart brand protection. If you leave PretzelBlogger.org unregistered and a competitor provides terrible customer service, their bad business practices will damage you.
A domain costs less than $10, so cover any plausible top-level variations for your domain and use your new keyword research skills to discover high-traffic misspellings of your domain name. Look for domains that will pass value (traffic) onto your store’s site. As for the domain with the lousy history, redirecting the bad domain at your already vetted good domain means you get all the traffic and none of the bad history.
Once you have those domains registered, set up a 301 redirect to point them to your e-commerce store. It might be tempting to turn some of your domains into dummy sites that link into your store, but engines frown on that strategy. Make sure every variation of your domain (yes, even PretzelBlogger.com vs. www.PretzelBlogger.com - Google counts the version without the ‘www’ prefix as a separate entity) points to the true, canonical version of your site.
Summing up
Successful branding, a strong Paid Search campaign, qualified links and a healthy social media presence can help even the most obscure domain find incoming traffic. Picking the right domain name from the start, however, can reinforce your brand and bring in an increased amount of direct and repeat traffic. Smart domain selection makes your e-commerce website more effective and requires just a little research!
This post is filed under Developers' Corner and has the following keyword tags: domain names, dns, addresses.
3 Comments
Dennis says:
This is a very important part of smart marketing. A very good strategy.
ddabbah says:
Really enjoyed the blog topic. We often find that companies either come up with great names but don't understand how to use them. The flip side is they come up with bad names and never recover.
Dave Dabbah
The Drive-Thru Marketer
DriveThirst
Jules says:
Your comment on using Wayback Machine to check the earlier status for domain names is an important one. Trying to recover from a blacklisted domain would be a painful task.
