Once a business owner asked a simple question – when should I consult a SEO expert? To put it more simply, he asked, at which stage of web site development should I consult a SEO expert?
Undoubtedly the answer is ‘as soon as you start thinking to book a domain name’. If you do not have any or enough SEO experience, it is better to talk to a SEO expert who has a good knowledge and experience not only in SEO but also in SEM and branding. A good domain name would definitely give you great mileage in future.
But if you do not want to consult an SEO expert at the very beginning of the process, you can follow these steps and depend on your foresight and assumptions.
If you have a company name like XYZ Associates and do not need visitors from organic search, you can book the domain name as XYZ.COM or XYZ.NET depending on your choice and availability. You can also look for country specific TLDs (top-level domain) like .co.uk, .fr etc. depending on your geographical location.
But if you want to use your website as a sales point and the internet as the customer source, you would need to think differently. Let’s take a real life situation. For example you want to sell SEO Services online and you have already formed a company call ABCDE Associates. Now, if you buy a domain name like abcdeassociates.com, does it say anything about your business! Will your target audience remember it easily? (Here I am assuming that this is a new born company and you do not have huge offline presence in the target market and region.)
The best way is to get the key business into the domain name – for example seoservices.com can be a good domain name where the people will easily remember the name for the specific service you are offering. Apart from that it would also help the search engines (your prospective customer source) to understand what you are dealing with to offer you relevant visitors. And in future it would definitely help to improve search engine rank of your website.
So what did we do here?
We tried to find out the key phrases that people normally use to search the product you are offering (here it is SEO Services). Now if the domain name seoservices.com is not available, we would try different permutation and combination of keywords and at the same time we would try to keep the name short and easy enough to understand at one go.
However, it is always better to use a generic name if you are to not too specific about the service or product you are offering. At the same time, if you are offering some services to people of a definite geo location, you can add the location name in the domain name. For example, if you are offering SEO services for Florida based businesses, you may have a domain name like Florida SEO or Florida Website marketing as your domain name.
But do not use different names as your website title and domain name. For example if you use a domain name floridaseo.com and use the title to be ABCDE Associates, it may confuse the visitors. It is always better to use same words for domain name and business name.