Choosing a domain name for your company or personal website is easy to do. Selecting the BEST available name will take as little as a few minutes or a few hours if the keyword or phrase is highly competitive.

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Your domain name should be search engine friendly, catchy and easy-to-remember.  I just read a great interview by Barbara Swafford talking with Darren Rowse of Problogger. Darren sheds hindsight on his domain name selections with Problogger.net (not a .com) and the lengthy and not so catchy, yet very successful Digital-Photography-School.com. Interestingly, Darren ended up purchasing Problogger.com for “a lot of money later” – ouch.

To prevent you from having to write fat checks, loose traffic or not get traffic at all, I have put together a simple tutorial with a few examples – How to Choose a Domain Name.

What is Your Audience Looking For? Google Keyword Tool

Google Keywords is great source to determine what your audience is looking for. Sure you may use the word “painter” but is “painting company” more popular and or less competitive? Is it “Philadelphia attorney” or “Philadelphia lawyer”? Do people look for “LA limo” or “Los Angles Limousines”?

Google Keyword Tool

Okay, you get the idea. Simply enter one keyword or phrase in per line and complete the CAPTCHA.

I like to sort the results by global volume unless the keyword has an international relationship like “Irish coffee”, “New London dentist” or similar.

Cool Tip With Firefox and Google Keyword Tool
Using Firefox, copy entire rows of the Google Keyword Tool search results to Notepad – you get Adsense/Adwords rates. When you download the search results to cvs or Excel, the rates are not displayed, nor are they displayed on screen.
Let’s look at the keywords “LA Limo” – simply copy (CTRL-C) and paste (CTRL-V) the results rows from Google keywords into Notepad. Poof – Adword rates per keyword.

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Choosing a Domain Name

The results pasted into Notepad is not formatted so you will have to delete extra spaces. I like to clean up the results in Notepad and paste into Excel for future ease of use.

QUICK TIP: You can always download the results in text or Excel using the links on the bottom of the Google Keywords results page.

The Adwords rates helps in a few ways. With the “LA limo” example, you can see the advertising costs per keyword and competitiveness. You also know much your competitors are willing to pay per click – nice to know.

What Domains Are Available – First Glance

Let’s continue with the “LA limo” example and propose our company is called Big Z’s Limo Service, located in Los Angles, California.

Simply add “Big Z” in front of the the Google Keywords search results – I am using the top 8 for this example.  I just type BigZ, copy it into my clipboard with (CTRL-C) and paste it (CTRL-V) in front of each term. I try not to type at all when I am searching for domains – it prevents typos, so I just cut and paste. Now I have:

What is available? (I like to use Network Solutions to search names in lots of 10. – I recommend registering your domain name at Bluehost!) You can always search Domain Auctions if you want to purchase an domain name already registered. Occasionally, you will find value, although expect to pay four digits plus for short names or high-traffic terms.

From an availability and search volume standpoint: BigZLALimo.com – looks good as LALimo.com is already taken. The name will certainly pickup on the local search market with LA in the domain name and the business offering is fairly clear.

As much as the company is called “Big Z’s Limo Service” the term “la limo service” receives only 13% of the traffic of the most popular term “la limo”. I suggest leaving off the word “service”.

Many company names sound good and look good in the phone book but dilute, distract and prohibit from achieving top search engine rankings.

BigZLALimo.com is a bit long, but again having LA in the domain for a local service company is important -  and less traffic lost to non-targeted visitors.

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From a business expansion standpoint and stationary printing – BigZLimo.com (which is available) – would be nice to have.

Plural or Singular? Limo or Limos

The name of game is Numbers. A great domain name gets tons of traffic from organic search results. The word limo has 3,350,000 local searches verses limos with 673,000 local searches. The singular word gets 5 times (4.97) as much traffic as the plural. People are typing “limo” 5 times as much as “limos”. Okay, you get the idea.

BigZLimos.com seems a bit catchier, but we are adding an extra character and now creating a term that receives considerably less traffic.

No Local Reference? Hmm… More Competition.

Without LA in the domain, the use of Google Maps Business Location and heavy use of LA and Los Angles in the Page Titles and Descriptions will help search rankings. Links to the website should contain anchor text with the keyword “LA Limo”.

Having the local reference in the domain name helps specify WHAT and WHERE – improving search rankings.

Recommendations: I recommend purchasing a few domains for your business and focusing on building on the name that receives the most amount of organic search engine traffic. For this example I recommend both BigZLimo.com and BigZLALimo.com.

A good SEO practice and to keep a Big Z happy about loosing the word “service” in his domain name, I would list his services on:
http://bigzlalimo.com/services/ – for service descriptions and
http://bigzlalimo.com/rentals/ – for hourly rates

Please Comment – What Domain Would You Choose?

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