Recently, I have been trying to come up with a name for my business. I wanted one that is clever, easy to remember, describes what I do and has an available URL. After months of picking the brains of friends and family, I came up with what I think is a great name. It’s clever, concise, speaks to what I do and is easy to remember. But the URL .com is not available. Only .biz is.
I’ve posed the question as to whether this makes a difference to search engines and/or site visitors and customers on various forums in LinkedIn. I’m curious to know what you think.
I would love to hear what your opinion is. I will post the results of both this poll and of some of the comments I receive in other forums in my next blog post.
I think in most cases, availability will make the decision for you.
All things being equal, the .com is a better address. But when you have to resort to cryptic URLs just to stay in .com, .com starts to lose its advantage.
For example, JohnRobinson.com is superior to JohnRobinson.biz, but if I have to resort to JC-Robinson, John_Robinson, or JRobinsonLynn1984 to stay in .com, I’m better off taking the simple JohnRobinson over to .biz.
If I own a bar called Stella’s Billiards, and some guy in Seattle already owns StellasBilliards.com, I’m better off with Stellasbilliards.biz than I am with Shootpoolindanvers.biz
Thanks John!
Katrina, I have battled with the same thing for the past 6 months. My company is named Marketing Integrity but a domain reseller owns MarketingIntegrity.com and will kindly sell it to me for $2300! A wee bit too steep a price in this economy!
My Tag Line is Navigate Your Marketing. I decided to purchase the domain http://NavigateYourMarketing.com/ – longer than I would like, but I think a reasonable solution. Ideally, if you can keep your domain shorter it is better. However, more and more, people are connecting to your business via a search on Google. Then it really just comes down to your domain being logical to understand as John nicely communicates above. Then, it is all about SEO and how your business represents itself through its web site.
You will also notice that doing something simple like capitalizing the first letter of each distinct word in the URL helps one read it better in print. Good luck in your decision! Hope this is helpful to you!
Thanks David. I’m still deciding on a name but I’m going with a .com…Thanks for the info and the link!
Katrina