Should your domain name be your brick and mortar business name? Many businesses, when they go online to build their first website and start marketing, will assume that their business name should be their domain name. But not necessarily.

Let’s say you own a lumber company named Jack’s located in Denver, Colorado. All the locals simply know it as Jack’s and when they are ready to go buy lumber they just say, “I’m heading on over to Jack’s.” Do you want your website domain name to be Jacks.com?

Chances are, that’s already taken. But you may be tempted to find other variations of the word Jack’s that fit with lumber. The obvious would be jackslumber.com. If it’s not taken then it could be the best bet for you; but what if it is taken? What then?

It’s much more important to have a domain name with your most important keyword in it. In other words, if you had a choice to have a domain name with the word “Jack” in it versus a domain name with the word “lumber” in it then you’d be better off with using “lumber.” The reason is because you want to rank for your important keyword as much as you can and as high in the rankings as you can. While the domain name is not the most important part of your web rankings calculation, the search engines do consider domain name. It’s just one of the criteria that they look at.

Therefore, when coming up with a domain name for your company, try to find one that best represents your company brand and that uses your most important keyword. It’s OK even to create a separate brand online that will serve as an extension of your off line business.

Caroline Melberg
Melberg Marketing
Blue Chip Marketing Tips
Small Business Mavericks

Tags: domain name, Internet marketing, local business, seo, small business

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Blue Chip Marketing Tips, Branding, Local Internet Marketing, SEO for Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.