The global pandemic has driven many Filipinos out of jobs, especially in the hospitality and tourism industry. This on the other hand, has a good side to it too. Many industrious Filipinos have taken this down time as an opportunity to start their own business; something that many have put in the back burner until recent times. This has led to the spawn of many home and online based business in the Philippines with varying degrees of success.
Do you own a small business, and it has grown to a stage where you are considering having a website for it? There are many pros to having a website for your business, especially when you want it to tap into the corporate customer market, or simply giving your business the professional outlook to attract more prospective customers.
One of the first things you need to do is to decide on a website domain name that you would like to go with. This is something that you should give good thought before deciding, because it is something that you will want to keep for the long term. Changing domain names often comes with downtime and complications with emails, and most importantly, the “domain authority” and search engine optimization of the website domain that takes years to build will be wasted.
Here are 5 essential tips on how to choose a good domain name for your business. Happy reading!
1. Reflects your brand and business
The domain name needs be unique to the name and type of business that you do. The best domain name for you is the one where people could get an idea of what your business is about by just looking at your domain name.
2. Easy to remember
Memorable domain names get directly searched on Google than those that are not. As the direct search volume grows, so does the ranking of your website on the related keywords. For a memorable domain name, avoid having difficult spelling and non-standard characters.
When a domain name is too hard to spell and type, it will affect the user experience when trying to recall or type it on their internet browser.
3. Keep it short
Keep your domain name short and sweet. As recommended by the big brothers Google and Moz; a general rule would to keep below 15 characters and maximum of 3 terms, or 4 terms if you really have to push it, but not more than that. Shorter domains are also easier to remember, pronounce, type and share.
|
Good
|
SamBakery.com
|
|
Still good
|
SamBakeryManila.com
|
|
Pushing it
|
SamBreadsAndCakesManila.com
|
|
Too much!
|
SamBreadsCakesAndCookiesManila.com
|
4. Drop the hyphen
Avoid the temptation to insert hyphens like sam-bakery.com or sam-bakery-manila.com. While it does in a way improve the readability, keep in mind domains with hyphens are often associated with spammy sites and behavior which may negatively impact the authority of your business domain. Therefore, it is recommended to not use any hyphens in your domain name.
5. Get a .com Top-level Domain
Top Level Domains (TLD) refers to the suffix that appears at the end of a domain name. Some of the most popular TLDs are:
- .com
- .net
- .org
- .gov
- .edu
When possible, go for a .com for your domain name. While some might debate this, it is unarguable that .com is by far the most recognized and most accessible TLD.
Try to play around and mix it up and see if you may be in luck. For example if SamBakery.com or SamBakeryManila.com is not available, how about SamBakeshop.com, or SamBakes.com… you get the idea.
If you have exhausted all ideas and still can’t find a good .com TLD for your domain name, you could look at .net and .co which are next in line for popularity. If your business serves a specific country, you can also look at country code top-level domain (ccTLD) like .ph for Philippines and .ca for Canada.
Last but not least...
Decided on your domain name and ready to for the next step? You may check for the domain name availability with a domain registrar and then proceed to register with them. More often than not, web hosting companies provide domain name registration too. In fact, most of them would throw in a free domain name registration for 1 year when you subscribe to a web hosting plan.
Web Hosting is another thing that you will need. There are many companies in the market, here’s a shortlist of web hosting companies to start you off with.