“Should My Domain Be In My Name?”

Should Your Domain Be In Your Name?

A Website Domain is a massively important part of your business, especially in today’s age where online business is bigger than ever.

So does it really matter what your Domain Name is called? From a purely technical level – no. No matter the name it will work as any other domain would. However, the major aspects to consider are branding, memorability, and to an extent, SEO.

Branding & Memorability

This arguably is the most important aspect of your domain name. Does it match your business’ current branding?

Typically the way to do this would be to have your domain name be the same as your business’ name. For example, Apple’s domain name is ‘Apple.com’. This sounds obvious but you’d be surprised how many websites don’t do this. This helps with your overall branding due to consistency and the repetition of the same name will make it more likely for prospects and clients to remember.

Consistent branding across all of your platforms and marketing will make the experience for the customer less jarring and confusing. They’ll always know when they’re on your site or looking at your content. Don’t underestimate the power of strong branding!

This could also be used as a time of self-reflection. Perhaps seeing a crazy long website address will make you realize if you need to re-brand your business’ name.

As another small benefit, having a matching name as to what appears on your website content will be good for SEO. Again this is about consistency, Google will recognize more usage of the same name. Of course, you want to be the first search result when someone does a search for your name directly right?

What Should I Call My Website Domain?

As long as your domain name is recognizable as relating to you or your company it will most likely be fine. Generally, the shorter, more readable, and more memorable a domain name is, the better. To use the Apple example again, imagine if instead of apple.com, their website was called applephonesandmacs.com…Not exactly easy to remember.

Often this will come down to how you want your brand to be seen. Major international brands will spend a lot of time and money making sure that they own all international versions of a domain name e.g:

• apple.com                   
• apple.co.uk
• apple.es              
• apple.cn
• apple.de

Email Domain Name

If possible it is important to get your email domain to be in your own name too. This is for mostly the same reasons as above. Having your own email looks a lot more professional in someone’s inbox too. For example, let’s compare:

[email protected] vs [email protected]

The second option looks more like a personal email account, rather than a business. Just something to consider.