Domain Names and SEO

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

For part three of my guide, I’ll be covering domain names and SEO; looking at the things to consider when selecting a domain. This advice is aimed at internet start-ups who are still in the planning phase of developing a website with the intention of optimising it for the search engines. This article follows on from Part Two: Web Hosting. You can follow this guide from the start by reading my introduction.

Descriptive Domains

Small business start-ups can give themselves a slight competitive advantage by using descriptive terms as both their company name and domain name. An example of a descriptive company and domain name would be Cars.com. Using a descriptive name for your company and your domain has one key advantage; once you have started to develop your website and generate interest in your business, people will link to you most often using your company name as the anchor text (by anchor text, I mean the clickable text in a hyperlink). As mentioned in the previous chapter, links to your site from external websites is a crucial element of SEO. Links that feature key-phrases relevant to your business within the anchor text can help you to secure higher rankings when people search on that phrase. If you were the owner of Cars.com you would undoubtedly benefit from people using the word “Cars” or “Cars.com” to link to you. At the time of writing this, Cars.com is the top ranking website on the U.S version of Google for the search term “cars”.

However, one word product or service related domains are now incredibly scarce. You couldn’t, for example, go to a domain registration company and purchase the domains Morgages.com or Insurance.co.uk. Domains using competitive keywords such as this and combinations of related keywords are not freely available to register and have not been for quite some time. A private deal to purchase one word domains of this sort could cost a very significant amount of money.

Identify your “Head” or “Core” Themes

Placing too much emphasis on your domain name is not necessary. Although websites featuring content relating to a single, focused theme usually rank better in the search engines than those that cover unrelated topics; this fact should not be a great influence on what to call your business or which domain name to choose. Today, search engine algorithms are sophisticated enough to be able to be able to identify content related topics. Your site content should therefore integrate a wide variety synonyms relating to your core theme. For example, if you were to set up a business primarily selling tennis shoes, your site content should also offer advice, articles, product pages and blogs relating to a variety of other related items; tennis rackets, tennis balls, sports equipment etc.

Small business owners looking to compete on competitive terms might want to consider integrating one core or “head” keyword into their domain name. In the case of the tennis shoes example, this could be LoveTennis.com or SlamTennisEquipment.com. Most search engines are able to identify separate concatenated keywords, so the inclusion of one major thematic keyword within your domain name will help to a small extent with establishing the thematic nature of your site. More importantly, however, it may assist with your CTR (click-through rate) when you do appear in search engine results pages. Take a look at the following two URLs:

www.lovetennis.com/tennis-shoes

www.zap-goods.com/shoes

If you were searching online for tennis shoes, which of the above two do you think you’d be most likely to click on? The first one stands out because Google highlights instances of your keywords in the URL. Also, which of these two urls is most likely to benefit from people linking to them? The first one is far more likely to be linked to with anchor text such as “love tennis” or “tennis shoes”.

Finally, I would recommend paying attention to the location of your domain. If you are a UK based start-up business and you plan to focus on the UK market, it would be advisable to register the co.uk version of your chosen domain. Registering a UK based business address and reflecting this address on your website contact page and footer will help the search engines to position your business and subsequently increase your chances of inclusion in local search results. I will discuss this final point in more detail in Part Ten: Targeting Local Search.

Domain Names and SEO Checklist

• Consider a domain that features a “head” or “major theme” keyword
• Don’t restrict yourself by choosing a domain name that is too specific
• Don’t fuss too much over the domain name – site content is key
• Select a relevant internet country code top-level domain, e.g co.uk

Part Four

In part four I will cover the topic of goal setting and how SEO planning is fundamental to future search engine success. Click here to go to part four.