When choosing the domain name for your business you have to take a lot of different factors into account. Choosing a domain name is often a compromise between branding and search engine optimisation. Your domain name is an extension of your brand but it is also a large ranking factor in SEO.

Here are the some of the questions we ask ourselves here at JumpStart when advising on domain name strategy

1. Where is the target market?
Choosing the correct TLD is very important. If your website is only going to be targeting Ireland then a .ie domain name is essential. If you have a more global reach then a .com name might suit better.

2. What is your brand name and is it important?
Branding can be over emphasised at times in the online marketing world. For many small companies that offer one off jobs, branding takes second place to SEO results. Branding is often a luxury for most companies on small budgets. At the end of the day their placement in Google can be the making or breaking of the company. This might mean the best strategy for that company is a purely keyword driven strategy

3. What services do you provide? What are your most important keywords? What are the traffic levels like for those keywords?
Knowing the entire keyword universe for a company is vital if you are to make a fully informed decision. You need to know which keywords will bring in the traffic that will make your website a success. You might find that in some situations it is even advisable to go with 2 websites instead of one.

Eamon Hartnett & Sons - a local company looking to the Internet for new business. They are in the coving business.

1. Their target market was Ireland only. Therefore, we advised on a .ie domain name. This would help them rank highly in the all important local search engines.
2. Their brand name was Eamon Hartnett & Sons – They did not have much of an Internet marketing budget and didn’t trust the Internet to get the leads that their business needed. Their customers were generally once off clients.
3. They provided coving services. Important keywords included ‘coving’, ‘coving services’, ‘coving company’ ‘coving Ireland’ etc. The broad term ‘coving’ had by far the most searches.

The owner wished to use the business name as the domain but we advised against. The reasons for this were:

• Having Eamon Hartnett & Sons in a domain name does not help your business secure new leads. Nobody will be looking for Eamon Hartnett & Sons and even if they did, their website will more than likely appear in the no.1 spots anyway for those terms as their name would be present throughout the site.
• It would make the domain name too long and there was a strong possibility of miss-spelling. This would effect direct traffic as well.
• As they were on a small budget, it was vital that they get high rankings quickly. It is harder for brand new websites & domain names to gain top rankings for their important search engines. Therefore, we felt it was vitally important that they focus strongly on their primary keyword – coving. By getting a domain name with coving in it they are ensuring that they will appear in search results for keyphrases with coving in them e.g. coving services, coving Limerick etc.

After explaining our rational for the domain choice, they agreed to go with our suggested name which was www.coving.ie. This choice of domain name has worked really well for this company and they now source all their work online from top rankings for coving related terms in search engine results. You can see their website at the top of Google.ie for ‘coving’, ‘coving Ireland’, ‘coving company’ etc.

In this particular example we actually used SEO to transform their company’s branding efforts. Eamon has adopted coving.ie as their new company name and their buildings, vans, business cards, newspaper ads etc. are all emblazoned with the new coving.ie brand.

We built the brand around the SEO.

This method obviously does not apply to all situations, as each company is unique. The point that I am trying to get across is that choosing a domain name that works is vital and you must put some thought into the process!