In this post we’ll try to help you choose your domain name, so if you’re wondering how to do it, we may at least clear up some concepts you weren’t sure about or hadn’t considered.
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You may be in one of the early stages of creating an eCommerce, so one of the first questions you’ll face is getting a good domain name which you’ll later host on a server. If so, you need to look at the following:
- .com domains are the easiest to remember, since this extension is very well known and has been since the early days of the internet. If your online business will be national or local in scope, it’s better to consider .es for Spain, .cat for Catalonia, .fr for France, etc. If your website is purely informational, .info would be the most suitable extension; for an organization, .org, and so on. The point is to give your domain the most appropriate extension.
- It’s impractical for your domain to contain numbers, since you’d always have to specify whether it uses digits or words. For example, with a domain like 321adventures.com, users may not be sure whether to type that or threetwooneadventures.com. It creates uncertainty. A basic rule is that a domain name should be easy to remember.
- Along the same lines is using hyphens in domains. Try to avoid them because they make it confusing to remember whether the domain name had a hyphen or not. Sometimes a hyphenated domain does make sense, for example when it includes keywords that help a website or eCommerce rank, but that’s another matter we won’t cover here.
- Going back to the importance of a memorable domain name, it should be catchy, easy to remember and easy to associate with our business. To achieve this, we need to weigh up whether to use a brand, a keyword or both. If we’re taking a new, unknown brand online, we can go all in on it if our goal is to build awareness (the domain alone won’t do it; it would take a major marketing and outreach campaign), or we can pair the brand with a word that describes the business model. Say we run a costume business under the brand Harlequin targeting the national market; we could choose harlequin.es or harlequincostumes.es. Personally, I’d go for the second option to take advantage of that keyword if I want to do SEO in the future. Many who think about SEO from the start tend to go straight for a domain name containing only the keyword that matters most to them. In that case, they would have chosen a domain like costumeshop.es or carnivalcostumes.es, without considering the brand.
- Is a long or short domain name better? The longer a domain is, the more likely people are to forget part of it or misspell it when searching. On the plus side, a longer name better describes the topic of the website or eCommerce. A reasonable length is no more than 15–20 letters.
Who said choosing a good domain name was easy?
As we mentioned at the start of this post, choosing a domain is one of the first things to do when taking your eCommerce or website online. Is it easy? Not entirely, as you’ve seen.
Of course, once you’ve settled on a name, the next task is deciding where to host it. That too takes time comparing plans and prices. My advice is to always seek guidance from professionals who can help you make the right decision.
If you want to learn more about SEO, and especially the basic parameters that give your eCommerce a solid foundation for ranking, we recommend this post on our blog: how to create an indexable online store.
As always, we hope we’ve answered some of your questions or helped you make some decisions, and we invite you to ask us anything.
