Choosing a Website Name for your Small Business Website

Your website name, otherwise known as domain name or URL is the address people use on the internet to access information about your business, and its’ products and/or services. It should in line with considerations on branding for your business including:

• Business Name
• Product name
• Service name
• Trademarks

It should be memorable and easily identifiable with your business, product or service.

If you are choosing just one domain name to represent your business, then it should be as close as possible to the name of the main product, service or trademark you are trying to sell. If you are going to have multiple domain names, then you can set different domain names for different key products, services and markets.

Branding Considerations

When considering you initial business branding, you will have considered your market and product and its demographics such as :

• Location
• Age group
• Life stage eg. young families, retirees etc
• Income group

This information helps you choose the language, image, placement and other key decisions for your marketing, it also translates to your domain name. For example if you are marketing information to teenagers about game systems you can get away with the spelling gamez in your business and website name, but it wouldn’t be so acceptable or accessible to retirees.

Other Helpful Information on Domain Names

• Avoid long domain names as these are difficult to type, less memorable and take up a lot of space on printed matter such as newspaper advertisements
• Make domain names meaningful, and descriptive – include words which describe your product such as www.reddogs.com
• Avoid abbreviations of longer terms www.rd.com could mean anything while www.reddogs.com makes more sense to people wanting to know about red dogs
• As much as possible use the keyword terms which people would enter into a search engine to look for your product, service or business
• Think about your demographics when choosing website names – consider what is accessible to your target market
• If your preferred website names are taken, hyphenated website names are possible

Update: Special rules apply to domains which end in .au, please read this follow on article at Website Names for Australian Small Businesses if you are interested in this type of website or domain name.