How to Select a Domain Name

Transcript

Welcome everybody. I am Michele with Bergh Consulting, and I’m here to do a quick little video for you on how to select a domain name. That’s a question that I get asked a lot by clients and potential clients and can… There are going to be a lot of back and forth trying to figure out the best route to go.

So hopefully these tips will help you when you are personally trying to select a domain name for your website and your business, because they’re really tied together. The first thing that I would suggest is to consider how it will impact email specifically, but really any way that you would use that, any place that you would share that. What is the impact going to be in those different spaces?

Email in particular, if you’re using your domain name and you want to do an info at your domain name, or customer service at your domain name or your name at your domain name, that should get really, really long. And not only does it create more potential for errors with people trying to type it out, or you telling somebody what that is and they misread it or mishear you, but it also sometimes doesn’t fit on a business card very well.

And you end up having to make the texts so small, it’s not readable. So you want to consider the different ways that you would be sharing that domain, and using that domain when selecting it to come up with the best version that will work best for you. The next tip I have is to look at the domain name that you’re looking at and review it for other potential words that might create some issues.

An example of that would be that I had a client years ago who was having some issues with her domain name getting caught in spam filters. And she came to me and said, “Well, do you have any idea why this might be happening?” And she had that domain for years long before I knew her. And I told her it was probably at least in part due to the fact that in the letters of the domain consecutively, was T-I-T.

So I’m thinking that those letters caused spam filters to see that domain as something it wasn’t, and also something she maybe wouldn’t want, associated with her brand. And that was what was getting it hung up in the spam filters, but it isn’t just spam filters. There might be other words that show up that you just don’t really want associated with your brand.

There might be acronyms, there might be shortened versions of words. So you really want to space out those letters and have someone else take a look at them, and see if there are any things that are showing up that might create some issues for you moving forward. Similar to that, do not choose words that are hard to spell.

The harder they are to spell, the more commonly they are misspelled. You’re going to cause… You’re going to have problems with people typing them wrong, spelling them wrong. Sometimes you can’t avoid that but wherever you can, avoid it. An example of unavoidable in a way is that my last name Bergh is spelled B-E-R-G-H. That is not a common spelling of the word, Bergh, the name Bergh at all.

But I’m still using it because it’s my last name. And I just decided to go with a fairly simple… Doing business as name, Bergh Consulting, and that meant having a name that was a little difficult to spell. My first name Michele also only has one L and it is more commonly seen with two L’s. Although over the years, that has shifted a little bit, and it’s probably 50/50 to what I see out there now.

But you want to make your domain as easy to say, as easy to read, as easy to spell as you can. So that you are not going to be losing traffic, losing customers, losing business, because somebody can’t find you because they keep misspelling your name. Don’t play with words either, every single time you share that domain, you are going to have to spell it out for them and probably do the I made it like this, but similar to this and it’s going to cause problems.

If you have to explain your name every time you say it, that’s a problem, it’s going to create a disconnect in your business and you don’t want that at all. If you want to play with words and be creative about that, I think that’s fine within names of programs and some of those kinds of things. But as your primary business and your primary domain name, I do not recommend playing with words.

It’s just leads to a lot of confusion and missed opportunities. If you are a solopreneur, I really recommend using your own name at least in part, everyone should buy their own name in whatever version they can. This does get difficult if they have a name that is fairly common, but if you can, I recommend grabbing it.

Yes, names sometimes do change, but they’re less likely to change than some of the other things. It’s more common for people to change programs or slightly shift their brand. And if you’ve got your name as your primary business piece, you’re less likely to have to do a lot of work around rebranding and restructuring things.

And to wrap all that together, basically follow that kiss rule. And in this case, it means keep it simple and short. As a side note and interesting fact, that the top 10 domains in terms of traffic are I believe less than 14 characters long. And I think that that includes the .com. So think google.com, those types of amazon.com, those types of businesses.

So the shorter it is, the better because people are less likely to misspell it. It’s easier to type. It’s easier to remember. So 18 is the max recommended but 14 is even better, less than 14. So hopefully these tips have been helpful for you if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below and I look forward to seeing you in the next video, have a great day.