How Your Domain Name Impacts Search
October 27, 2017
Prashant Shukla
Choosing a domain name is much like choosing a company name, except this one goes on the internet. While some companies opt to stick to their company names as their domain names, there are other ways that you can do to help your business thrive in the World Wide Web.
But what’s the fuss about domain names when you can just use your company name? Well, it impacts search. This means, your presence on the internet is affected by your choice of domain name. This is what marketers usually call as SEO impact.
Image credit: DepositFiles
Understanding How Search Works
To understand search engine optimization vis a vis domains, you need to understand how Google’s algorithm works. Now, this might seem technical in nature, in truth, it looks out for the interest of people looking to the web for answers to their problems. While this may be a lengthy discussion, what you really need to keep in mind is people behaviour as well. Technically, Google or other search engines crawl or scan websites and indexes data. When they organize data, they take note of “key signals”, which may be keywords, relevance, site freshness and so on.
Keywords and More
One of the information that Google searches and ranks for is keywords. Marketers research keywords and its relevance to the business in order to anticipate search behaviour. Some will use company names as their domain names, like what most big businesses do. But the more creative way is to either get a generic keyword related to the business or a niche keyword to drive any enquiry to the website. In other cases, site owners register multiple domain names to cover all the bases, so to speak. Keywords are important because internet users type in specific keywords to answer their queries. Some would type in single keywords, others use phrases.
Registering multiple domain names on LCN.com
Moreover, while keywords are not the only ranking factor, it plays a role that makes it easy for crawling to identify information on your site.
Branding, Your Identity in the Market
SEO has components that business owners will not understand, but one thing that you need to consider when it comes to domains and search, is branding. Sure, you want to be discovered easily, but will you soon create an identity for yourself with the domain names you choose? Relevance will always be important not just for search engines but to people. Branding is why big companies dare to use their company names as domain names. They have created an online reputation that is associated to their brand. Your domain name, is a part of SEO, and is a part of how you use it to create top-of-mind experience with your visitors.
You may be tempted to just choose a domain name that ensures you of a high click-through-rate (CTR), but will you ever create stickiness to your customers, thus, capturing the relevant customers?
Balance Specific and Generic
Your domain name is your sales and marketing tool online. Choose the wrong ones and it affects search factors, therefore opportunities for a sale. On the other hand, choosing just one factor will also affect your business in the long run. So, before choosing a domain name, ensure you have the right reasons in the right place. Specific and generic keywords on your domain names need not be so far off from each other to help increase CTRs and eventually traffic to your site. With this, you will need research extensively to get the right balance. Additionally, research will help you see a trend in search behaviour that will aid you anticipate visitor needs, and act promptly to serve new and existing customers.
Furthermore, change your view of domain names as just a responsibility for your IT team. When it affects traffic to your website, and branding later on, domain naming becomes an all-hands on deck accountability.
Additional Read: Which Top Level Domain is Better: com vs org vs net vs co vs io
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This Guest Blog post was written by Tim Erinwright, a UK-based web developer at his freelance gig WRightDigital, and a self-professed tech geek and writer. When he’s not creating magic on WordPress, he can be found analyzing the “Song of Ice and Fire” books, and of course hiking.
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