Nowadays, when choosing a business name, people often choose a name that also happens to be a derivative or a misspelling. How will your business domain be affected?
Why do you have a typo in your name?
Company name is one of the most important aspects of any busines. Choosing your online company name is even more tricky, as you’ll need to make sure you can register a .com domain. That’s why many prospective business people choose to form derivatives from various words, misspellings or alternative variants.
What is it all about?
Normally, the main task of the domain is to be remarkable. Additional attributes could be:
* short enough
* easy to spell over the phone
* easy to spell at all
* easy to remember
* one can understand what the business is about from the name
* can register a .com variant
* is a word (or a variation of), related to your business
So, it is pretty hard to use a common word as your domain word, especially when domain squatters have hundreds of thousands of domain each. That’s why coining a new word, based on a common word may be helpful. Examples of these could be:
* Flickr
* Digg
* del.icio.us
Another good tip for picking a domain name is pretty simple: find the domain you are comfortable with, and live with it. Of course, if it follows all the above points, so much the better, but a good rule should be that you need to enjoy the domain, too.
What to do?
When your company only resembles a known word, there may be several things to remember:
* you’ll need to explain to your customers why you have named your business that way (so they’d remember the name through associations)
* your customers will need to get used to your name
* you’ll need to get noticed online, so that people (and the search engines) wouldn’t think that your name is a typo or a soon-to-be-gone abstraction
When it comes to customers, you need to build experience for them (partly through efficient performance design), so they’d be able to form an impression about your business. This is what builds your brand and makes it rememberable.
When it comes to the search engines, you may have noticed that they show correct variants, when you type in a misspelling. The same may happen when you enter your company name there. How do you cope with it?
The reason the search engines consider your name as a misspelling (as well as people, really), is that it is not, yet, well known. So you, basically, need to make sure your name is sufficiently wide spread to be its own word. You can do this by contributing on other websites in the industry, writing your own blog and so forth.
Read more about how Google shows results for misspellings at SEO by the SEA.
Summing up
Apart from having a great domain name, you need to remember that it is customer experience that builds a brand: how good you are, how happy your customers are, how politely you respond to unhappy customers and so on. Whatever, happens, stay focused on delivering value to your customers and you’ll be fine.
Read more about choosing domains:
* Naming a business
* A name game by Guy Kawasaki
* Naming a web-based business at SEOmoz
* 18 questions your CEO forgot to ask
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About the Author
Yuri Filimonov is a freelance website optimization and usability consultant, who writes about improving websites to gain more visitors, customers and profit at his blog, http://www.ImproveTheWeb.com.
