What’s in a name? How to choose a domain name?

What’s in a Name? How to Choose a Domain Name

It’s no secret that as a small business, establishing a strong digital ecosystem drives superior outcomes, and helps you compete on a level playing field, against larger and more established players from your chosen industry.

Key advantages of a robust digital footprint

As a medium of marketing and communications in particular, the digital space offers a range of advantages over traditional media. Among other things, it:

• Helps you reach out to a critical mass of demographically geographically, and behaviorally targeted prospects in a cost-effective manner.
• Provides a versatile multi-media canvas, to help you showcase your offering and communicate with your prospects in a creatively compelling and immersively engaging fashion.
• Enables effective real-time tracking across multiple metrics and real-time course correction at minimal incremental cost – ensuring optimal marketing ROI.

The lynchpin of your digital eco-system

You can set up accounts on various social media platforms – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on. You can put your company profile up on business listing and review sites such as Google My Business, Yahoo Local, Yelp!, FourSquare, HotFrog, and more. All of these qualify as ‘owned’ media.

But your website – your very own little piece of digital real estate – has to form the core around which your digital presence is built. It is the custom-built home in which your business virtually resides. It must project the unique identity of your business and reflect the core values it stands for.

It must also serve as a unified repository for everything you want your prospects to know about your business. This information is typically divided into distinct ‘rooms’ or sections – dealing with various aspects of your business, which may include but is not necessarily limited to:

• Your Company: credentials and track record
• Your Offering/s: features, benefits, price-points
• Your Customer: insights into need-gaps that your offering plugs
• Customer Reviews & Case Studies: customer experiences vis-à-vis your offering
• Special Offers & Discounts: and other such triggers for prospects to enquire, engage with, or purchase your offering.
• News: internal posts and announcements and external media coverage about your company
• Value-added content: thought leadership articles, white papers, videos, podcasts, blogs…

To use another analogy, look at your website as your own private ‘planet’ in cyberspace. Your Twitter handle, your LinkedIn account, your Facebook, Yahoo Local, or Yelp! profiles are ‘satellites’ that orbit your ‘planet’ – with data constantly being beamed back and forth between your ‘planet’ and its ‘satellites’.

The gateway to your website

But before you start planning the framework and structure of your website, you must decide on its domain name. This, in effect, is the virtual address, the gateway, and the key to the virtual home of your business – all rolled into one.

The importance of your domain name cannot be overstated. It defines your business or brand, helps form the first impression, and impacts your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Here are some general guidelines to keep in mind, when choosing your domain name:

• Choose a .com domain name
It’s what your prospects are most familiar with. If the exact .com domain name you want is not available, keep a few alternatives as backups. For instance, if www.tizgee.com wasn’t available, www.tizgeellc.com or even www.tizgeedesign.com would probably be better alternatives than www.tizgee.org or www.tizgee.net. Obviously, if a .com domain name is not available for even your backup alternatives, you will have to choose from among the two next best options – a .org or .net domain name.

• Unique and brandable rather than common and generic
Among insurance comparison websites, for instance, the domain name www.thezebra.com would be relatively easy to search for and locate than www.compare.com which may get lost in a sea of listings with the generic word ‘compare’ in it.

• Keep it short and easy to remember
Put yourself in the shoes of prospects who find your domain name on your business card or any of your printed marketing collaterals, and want to visit your website. They would much rather type in www.tizgee.com, than www.tizgeemultimediadesign.com. If you must have multiple words in your domain name, avoid a situation where the last letter of one word is the same as the first letter of the next – for example www.theengineeringgroup.com. Such domain names can be confusing and hard to read.

• Consider adding a keyword that describes the nature of your business or offering
Particularly if your business is a startup and its area of expertise has not yet been established. For instance, users may wonder what www.wayne.com deals with, but will immediately know what business www.waynehomes.com is into.

Checking for domain name availability

Log on to any of several portals that allow you to purchase domain names online. Type in the domain name you want to check the availability for. If it is not available, check for desired alternatives. Many of these sites also provide domain name generators that spew out close matches to the domain name you want, that are available for purchase.

Some of the most popular of these websites include:

www.domain.com
www.godaddy.com
www.hostgator.com
www.hostinger.com
www.namecheap.com
www.name.com

Your domain name may play a key role in finalizing your brand name

If you own a running business, you are limited by your existing brand name and will perforce need to retrofit your domain name to correspond as closely as possible to your brand name.

But if you are a startup, particularly if your business is conducted exclusively or even predominantly online, you must build an additional filter into the formulation of your brand name itself, in order to ensure that a domain name that closely corresponds to it is available for you to purchase.

Happy hunting folks!

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WHAT OUR CLIENTS ARE SAYING

“Working with Tizgee will provide you with the much-needed support system you crave as a small business owner. They offer unmatched service, listen to your story, and patiently teach you critical pieces to grow your brand and business. With weekly check-ins, the team at Tizgee helps you discuss pressing issues and anything worth pivoting towards or away. They are a team whose conversations are characterized by teamwork, without arrogance or dogmatic speech. Tizgee understands your goals and is committed to helping you achieve them. If you want a team that will listen to you and help you succeed, then Tizgee is the solution you have been looking for.”

- Stephanie Taylor, Owner and CEO, Remnant Farm Kombucha

“Tizgee has been our go-to web team since the Association of Clinicians for the Underserved's STAR² Center project started almost 6 years ago. We focus on training, resources, and technical assistance to recruit and retain clinicians in underserved areas. Tizgee helped us to build and maintain a clean and inviting website that functions as a resource center. We have since designed a discussion board function, built out a learning management system, developed web-based assessment tools, and added integrations to additional databases to really make our site a one-stop-shop for training and resources for our audience. ”

- Mariah Blake, Program Manager, STAR² Center

“An absolute pleasure to work with. The level of quality and professionalism is unmatched, and in the six years we have worked with Tizgee they have become an invaluable asset to our company’s success.”

- Michael Thornton Jr., Director of Programs & Operations, Visionary Consulting Partners

“Our independent record label wanted to polish and upgrade our branding to match our increasing profile but found we needed to bring on someone who understood our values and design preferences. We chose Tizgee. We felt both our quirkiness and our need for authenticity was well understood and reflected in our design. We were very happy with how our many, including occasionally contradictory, requirements were met by Tizgee’s excellent design team.”

- Rishi Gupta, Artist and A&R Representative

“Tizgee is an integral part of our communications team and they are very responsive to our needs. They helped us launch and refresh three websites and are very knowledgeable about web design trends and user-experience best-practices. They helped us think outside of the box when redesigning our website. We wanted the time and effort spent on the redesign to result in a new look and a better information flow, and they delivered.”

- Susan Wade, VP of Marketing and Communications, The Vinyl Institute

“Thanks, Tizgee for doing an amazing job of supporting our Department of Defense Mentor Protégé Program! Your expertise in digital management and rebranding positioned the Protégé firms with a website to better support their customer mission and attract potential new hires.”

- Deborah Jackson-Hamilton, Perspecta, Small Business Partnership Programs

“The team at Tizgee designed a website that authentically represents my company and I still love it every time I look at it. They later helped me with a redesign when I wanted to make changes. They maintain my site and resolve any issues–often before I even notice the problem. They are always responsive to my requests. I love working with them!”

- Heather Suri, Practice Owner, Pathways in Aging