If you didn’t know this yet, the domain name is the one showing up in your website’s URL. It can reflect the name of your company, of a product, or service.
For example, abc.xyz is the domain name for Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc.
The product itself has its own domain name, the one we all know: google.com.
As you can see your business name isn’t always the name of your product.
Now, the thing is that you need to take your time when choosing your domain name. What you need to take into consideration when doing your research:
- Is the name memorable and easy to pronounce?
- Do you want to launch internationally? If so, does the name mean anything in the market you’re interested in? Check for translations, you might have some surprises.
- Is the name already used by another company? Look for social media profiles, Youtube videos, Google images, to see what is the name associated with.
- Make a list of relevant keywords for your business/product. Think of how the users should feel after using the product. Let’s say you sell cosmetics based on natural ingredients. Your list might contain words such as “skin”, “care”, “safe”, “natural”, “beautiful”, “fresh” etc. Use a tool such BrandRoot to generate domain name ideas. I usually make a list of suffixes that I can play with. Let’s take “ify” for example. Do Spotify and Shopify sound familiar?
Now, this is how things work in BrandRoot: you type in a sequence of letters, and the tool will build ideas starting from them.
- Choose a top-level domain (TLD) for your site. The letters at the end of a website address are known as TLD. They can show the geographical area the website addresses to (eg. google.co.uk addresses UK users), or its purpose (eg: .org is used by organizations and foundations such as https://www.gatesfoundation.org/). The most popular TLD is .com. But you’ll also find .net, .co, io, .dev, .digital, etc.
- Buy your domain. Now, the moment you are checking for domain availability, the domain registrar will also show you the available TLDs.
Source: namecheap.com