Finding the right domain name for your business

If you are looking to find the right domain name for your business, you might be considering whether domain name extensions such as .bike or .shoes are something you need to worry about.

Your domain name is your unique online identity, so ideally it will be a name that matches your company name or describes what you do, it will be short and easy to remember.

If you can’t get a good .co.nz name, or don’t want to change the name of your business, you can choose from many domain extensions that can say what you do, simply and memorably, like fishing.guru or computer.training.

Even if you already have a .co.nz address, you might want to consider a new extension as an alternate, or simply to register your name with the new extensions to protect your brand. For brand protection, only consider addresses that are truly relevant to your business. For example, a clothing store might register myboutique.clothing and myboutique.shop, but registering myboutique.pizza or myboutique.farm wouldn’t make much sense.

ONLINE MARKETING

Search engines like Google don’t use domain names to rank search results, so myboutique.clothing will not do any better in Google results at this stage than myboutique.co.nz. To get high rankings in Google your website simply needs to have the most relevant content for the term that was searched.

From a marketing point of view, the opportunities to make an impact and to stand out, as well as to ‘get it wrong’ are much greater. Picking the right name for a new business or a new product can be daunting at the best of times, so where to start? Check out some of the helpful tips below.

THE BEST DOMAIN NAMES ARE:

Easily recalled, spelled and pronounced - say it out loud to someone
Consistent with your business branding and positioning strategy
Indicative of the product’s (or service) major benefits and characteristics
Distinctive (unique, stand out)
Meaningful to the customer
Capable of registration and protection (remember to keep an eye on trademarks)

At the end of the day, you want a domain name that describes your business so people searching for you can find you. If you can do this with a .co.nz domain then that’s probably where you should start for now, but if not, consider a new domain extension and be a little more unique with your online brand.