If you are looking to acquire your first domain or a new domain name for your second business idea, then you should definitely consider getting a branded domain. In fact, you shouldn’t be thinking about any other option, because companies that have branded domain names will always have an edge over their competitors that might be using some generic or ill-considered string of letters and special characters. These domain names are not only difficult to remember, but they are also hurting the brand’s SEO score as well as its reputation, so needless to say, you don’t want to be associated with those types of brands in the online world.
Instead, you should leverage a branded domain to enrich your omni-channel marketing approach and use it to sell more, achieve more, and grow your company faster. Let’s go over the five key ways you can use branded domains to promote your business online.
Build a Memorable Online Presence
The first and probably the most obvious way that a branded domain can boost your marketing efforts is by making your business more memorable, trustworthy, and authoritative in the online realm. When you choose a branded domain that is short, sweet, and to the point, you are making it easier for your target demographic to find you online, and to remember your domain name – allowing them to find your site again and again with ease, which will also boost your standing in the SERPs. But we’ll talk about SEO shortly, for now, let’s stick with brand stickiness.
To make a brand stick in the hearts and minds of your audience, it needs to be easy to remember. No matter if your brand name is short and catchy or a bit of a mouthful, you should always strive to make your domain name as short as possible. Remember the following:
- Branded domains should ideally contain just your brand name and nothing more.
- Avoid special characters such as underscores, dashes, numbers, and other.
- You can use abbreviations if your company has a particularly long name.
- You can add a relevant keyword into the domain, but make sure it’s short.
- Make sure you obtain a top-level-domain if possible.
Use it to Create a Branded Email Address
Many novice entrepreneurs and even experienced business leaders forget about one important feature of successful online branding, and that’s your company’s email address. If you want to create a professional, trustworthy image, then you should weave your brand’s name into every email address in your company, and to do that you need to have a branded domain name.
After all, “dan@awesomecompany.com” sounds way more professional than “danawesomecompany@gmail.com”, plus it’s way more memorable than the latter option. Having branded email addresses for all of your employees is also a great way to promote your brand through numerous marketing channels, such as business cards, as your brand’s name will be literally printed next to your name.
Weave Personalization Into the Domain Itself
It’s important that you create a domain name that portrays your brand in the best possible light, but you shouldn’t do it at the expense of your top-level-domain. In other words, if you get a .xyz instead of a .com or a .me, you are running the risk of making your URL less memorable while jeopardizing your position in the SERPs. Simply put, the search engines love brand domains that boast a real TLD.
This is especially important if you’re trying to build a reputable personal brand in a competitive niche, as you need all of the SEO juice you can get to stand out in an oversaturated market. This is why TLDs such as .me work particularly well, as they allow you to add a personal touch to your entire brand and its online presence, which invariably helps with stickiness and brand promotion.
Improve Organic Traffic Through a Branded Domain Name
One of the key objectives of any growth-oriented company should be to grow its organic traffic and win at organic marketing. To achieve this, you need to leverage content creation and meticulously implement SEO through keywords as well as on-page and off-page optimization.
It also means that you need to get a lot of backlink juice to your site, which is why it’s important that the anchor texts of all of your backlinks to match your brand’s URL. This will tell Google that your brand deserves to be at the top of the SERPs for those keywords.
Engage With a Niche Market
Last but not least, keep in mind that a branded domain name can help you connect with a specific type of customer on a more personal level. When optimized the right way, it can even lead users to specific pages and subdomains so that they don’t have to go through your entire website until they find what they’re looking for. These are called hyper-specific domains or contextual domains, and you should use them to improve your brand’s promotional capabilities.
Wrapping Up
A powerful marketing strategy starts with choosing the right domain name. With these tips in mind, go ahead and make a branded domain name that will help you promote your company across the online and offline worlds.
Featured image credit: Freepik.com
My name is Raul, editor in chief at Technivorz blog. I have a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. You can reach me out on Twitter.
