By Owen Fay . Posted on January 6, 2022Choosing the right domain name for your business is critical for success. The wrong domain name might give the wrong impression and could be a hassle to change later without hurting your brand or search rankings.
That is why it is vital to select the best domain name from the start. When you start it can be hard to come up with an unforgettable business name with the perfect domain name.
In this article, we’ll share some tools and tips you need to get your domain name right before your business goes live.
Tips for choosing a domain name
When starting a new business finding an identity and choosing a domain name can be stressful because you want to avoid mistakes that could be time-consuming and costly down the road.
To make the process easier we have some tips that you can use to pick the right domain name for your business.
1. Keep It Short
The length of your domain name matters a lot when reaching your customers. While a long domain name might increase the chances of getting your brand name it can have some negative effects. Longer domain names can be hard to remember, be more prone to user errors, or affect search results.
Would you rather search for zappos.com or zapposshoesandclothing.com, definitely zappos.com. Having a short, specific, and identifiable name goes a long way when consumers are searching for your business.
We recommend keeping your domain name under 15 characters to be memorable and avoid typos or lost traffic.
2. Use Keywords
Keywords play an important role in your business’s domain name. Using keywords in your domain name tells search engines what you’re about. With quality content and a good user experience, keywords can help your business rank higher in search.
It might be hard to find a good domain name with your target keywords that’s not taken. You will need to get creative, do research, and maybe combine keywords to stand out.
3. Keep It Easy to Spell and Pronounce
Sharing your domain with your audience can be a big part of growing your business. It should be easy to pronounce and spell when speaking as well as writing or searching.
Your domain name has a lot more uses than you might think, it should be easy to spell and understand in any situation.
4. Avoid Double Letter and Hyphens
This tip goes hand in hand with making your domain name easy to pronounce and spell. Using double letters in a domain name that has multiple words can lead to numerous typos and errors.
For example, Presssetup.com will have more typos and could lead to loss in traffic for your business.
Hyphens in your domain name can hurt the credibility of your site and could be a sign of spam. Hyphened domains, like double letter domains, are more prone to typos. Additionally, if you use a hyphen or double letter because the domain you wanted was already taken traffic could go to competitors if users forget to add in the hyphen.
Avoiding double letters and hyphens in your domain name will help decrease errors in search.
5. Make it Unique and Brandable
Your business’s domain name needs to be unique, so you stand out amongst the field of competitors. It’s important to do some research on other sites in your industry to find out what domains competitors are using.
Choosing a domain name that is brandable and can work for your business is also important. These domain names are catchy, memorable, and unique.
A domain name like cars.com is much more brandable than BuyCarsOnline.com, letting your business optimize marketing for your domain name.
Once you’ve used some of our tips to create potential domain names it is time to make the final decision. The choice you make has a big influence on your business and how you are able to grow moving forward.
How To Make the Final Decision
Making a mistake with your domain name can cause a lot of problems for your business. Avoiding that risk is important for your business to have success from the start.
Obviously, you need to choose a domain name comes before your website goes live as you need it to allow people to go to your page. This is where usability testing can help you make the right choice, it will let you try variations of your domain, and the data will show what works best before you launch.
What is Usability A/B Testing
Usability A/B testing is a human-centered process to evaluate a product, service, website, app, or other resources with real users to gain insights into their experiences. With usability A/B testing two variations of the resource are shown to a panel of users to find the option that delivers the biggest impact, archives business goals, and drives metrics.
Usability A/B testing is easy to understand, you start with two domain names, and then the variations are presented to a panel of users who choose the one they prefer.
You might have a few ideas about what the best domain name is for your business, using your own judgment or asking a few friends could be biased or be too small of a sample size to make the right choice.
But what if you could ask hundreds or thousands of people what they think is the best domain name for your business?
Usability A/B testing lets you do exactly that. Your domain names are presented to a panel of hundreds that vote on the best option and tell you exactly why they chose that option.
This gives you great customer feedback to make an educated decision on your domain name with data-backed reasoning.
How to Test Your Domain Name
Poll the People’s testing platform makes testing everything from your logo to your landing page fast, simple, and inexpensive. For this article, we are going to focus on testing your domain name.
The platform is quick to set up (less than 5 minutes) and the test can be done in less than an hour.
Start with two of your best domain name options and choose a “text” poll format. Ask a simple question like “What is the better domain name?” and set options A and B to the variation.
Here is an example of a poll that is trying to find the best domain name for the business.
Next, you can set the number of respondents. For most tests, about 100 responses is a good number to get a clear winner. 100 responses should give you enough confidence and consumer feedback to make your decision with a reduced risk of failure.
After setting your audience and number of respondents you are ready to launch the test. Just check out and the test will launch instantly.
Understanding the data and making the final decision is the only thing you need to worry about now. Luckily, Poll the People gives you easy to understand, valuable data that clearly shows your winner and gives you each respondent’s reasoning behind their vote
Conclusion
Deciding on your domain name can be one of the most important choices your business has to make. Following our steps for creating a domain name can help in reaching the right audience and showing your consumers who you are.
Having a unique, easy-to-understand, relevant domain name can make all the difference in branding, traffic, and growth for your business.
If you’re ready to see if you have the best domain name for your business, sign up and run your test!
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