We are now at the point where a new business, online or not, needs to think about how their creative name corresponds to the online domain name they will inevitably have one day.  Here’s a quick example:

I have a new favorite hamburge place called Five Guys Burgers & Fries.  Luckily I did a Google search for them before assuming their domain was either 5guys.com or FiveGuys.com.  That said, a friend of mine wasn’t so lucky and assumed that 5guys.com was the hamburger places site.  He emailed me over the weekend and said: “don’t go to 5guys.com ever!  Just so you know it’s FiveGuys.com”.  Now I don’t want you to go to adult sites or make any assumptions but it does illustrate an important point.  Yellow Pages are no longer the way to find things locally.  It’s now Craigslist, Google or the iPhone.  That means you’re business information will be online and ultimately, people will start making assumptions that you have a website.  Does your business name translate well?

A few things to remember when picking a domain name for your business:

1. Keep It Simple! Law Firms are great because anyone connected to a law firm gets their name in the title.  When 5 partners go in on a new law firm the name can be quite intriguing.  Keeping it simple means ABCDELaw.com vs. everyone’s names spelled out .com.

2. Be Descriptive! Using the same keywords in your domain name that your customers will use to find you has to be a top priority.  Online searching is done by keyword, if you have  a descriptive keyword or keyword phrase vs. a cutesy name and you care about your online success, go with the keywords.

3. Don’t forget the misspellings. Just like in the FiveGuys.com example, the number five can be a numeric 5 or a written five and if you are on the phone, radio or television talking about FiveGuys.com it’s a 50/50 split on numeric vs. written.  Adding an “s” to the end or grabbing the .net and .org is only an extra $10 a year and well worth the saving of a client.

You can still have lots of fun with a domain name (ie:  Zappos.com, Google.com, Yahoo.com, Woot.com) but when you are a local business looking for local traffic every detail counts and by adding the targeted keywords to your domain you will be that much closer to beating the competition and setting yourself up for online success.

I  buy 90% of my from GoDaddy.com or Moniker.com and always recommend a Google search for “Godaddy Coupon Code” before buying a domain.