(Newswire.net — January 25, 2016) — The Ecommerce business model picked a lot of steam over the last few years, with many business brick and mortar owners embracing it as a way to get their wares to potential customers on the web.
However, a common path towed by many such business owners is to embrace offers from ecommerce giants that allow them to sell products off a subdomain. Take for example Shopify. They offer business owners the opportunity to sell products on “theirstorename.shopify.com”. On the surface, there is nothing wrong with this. For a serious e-commerce owner however, personal domain registration cannot be overemphasised.
When you take the Shopify model in the above example, you expose your business to the following:
- Being completely controlled by the parent company
- Inability to deploy your own marketing strategies
- Constant defence of your professionalism
- Inability to reach sales potentials as discoverability of your business is tied to that of the parent company
- Increased competition from similar businesses on the platform with whom you share traffic to the parent company site
“When you choose a good domain name for your store instead of relying on a subdomain handed out free from elsewhere, you can build credibility and demonstrate professionalism” says Brendan at Umbrellar.
If the name you chose during domain registration reflects keywords searched by people looking for your goods and services, you can improve traffic to your business by more than 50%.
Choosing the right name during domain registration isn’t straightforward though as there are already many websites out there. However, there are steps you can take to simplify the process. Here is a short guide you can work with.
- According to BrandDo, your domain name should be catchy, memorable, easy to spell and pronounce and most importantly short.
- During domain name registrations, be careful to ensure you do not choose a name that is too similar to one from your competition. Doing so could lead to trademark lawsuits. Going back to the shopify.com example, you will most likely be hit with a lawsuit if you register shopily.com today.
- .com is still king. Dozens of new generic top level domains (gTLDs) have been released and many people are embracing them for various reasons. However, the average web user will remember .com domains faster than any other extensions. The new domain extensions will take time to become popular. If your business is country specific, consider registering a .nz domain for New Zealand or .co.uk for the United Kingdom.
- Are you relying on traffic from search engines? You need to ensure your domain name features keywords or phrases used in searching for your products as it will improve your ranking in the search engine results. If you are relying on paid adverts or other means of marketing, you can succeed with using a brand name. For example, a TV stand business using a brand domain could register fixersone.com. A keyword rich domain would be TVmounts.com
- You need to be creative and spend time on creating the perfect domain. Most single and double word domains are unavailable so you should explore options using two phrases, blending two words, dropping the vowels from a normal word without making it hard to pronounce, adding a prefix or suffix, etc.