Human recall sucks. If your site’s domain name isn’t easy to remember, you’ll lose type-in traffic. Taking advantage of existing brand awareness is the easiest way to encourage recall – if your company name is electric pulp, your domain name should be electricpulp.com.
But, if your site’s domain name doesn’t include keywords, your search ranking suffers. If you’re a web developer, webdeveloper.com would seem like the ideal domain (sorry, it’s already taken.)
The majority thinks in terms of one or the other (and typically leans toward company name.) It should be thinking both.
The simple truth is that it’s a lot easier to rank well in a search for your company’s name than it is to rank well in a search for what you offer. To use my earlier examples, securing a top search rank for “electric pulp” is a lot easier than securing “web developer.”
Had we purchased webdeveloper.com when it was available (c. 1974,) we could have helped ensure a high ranking on the phrase (assuming that we also understand semantic content.) Human recall could be addressed by using our company name, electricpulp.com, in our marketing. The latter would redirect to the former, everyone would be happy, we’d have more leads.
The logical fallacy here is that we would know what our magic keyword phrase is. I can’t tell you what the public is thinking when they search for us. Web developer probably isn’t it. And there are a number of other factors that make the question more complicated as well.
What I do know for sure is that domain names are [becoming] a lot more than branding tools. We handle more than 500 client domains, and each one has different conditions.
An email from a colleague is spurring this post. Anybody have further thoughts on the subject?
One Response to “Choosing the right domain name – company name vs. keywords”
How about ones that follow neither of these rules – i.e. mostresponsive.com I would have thought an agency could do better.