Choosing your domain name is one of the most important aspects of your business, brand, and strategy as a whole. If you are thinking about starting a company, the first thing you should do, before even giving your company a name, is to check the domain name registrar to see what URL’s are available. If there are no .com domains, you may need to ask yourself a few questions.

Who owns the .com domain? What if it is a business that you wouldn’t want your business associated with? Can you imagine someone typing in your URL and accidentally typing .com only to be surprised by something that is clearly not your business? You may have just permanently lost that potential customer. Is it a type of business that you can compete with?

What role do domain names play in SEO?

Domain names have a long history of impacting SEO strategies. While we’ve discussed high-level SEO strategies before, there are small details that can also impact your rankings, such as domain names, or even an SSL. Having a .com website is ultimately a good business decision for your website.

“.com” is hard-wired into our brains. When we type in a website URL, it is engrained in our brains to end it with .com. It is more common, more authoritative, more memorable, and more popular than any other option. Now, if you’re an organization (.org), governmental agency (.gov), or anything to that effect, it’s a little different. However, we are talking about small businesses and for small businesses, having a .com domain is a smart business decision.

Here’s a little tip from us to you. Although .com is the better option for your website, it is also beneficial to own other variations of your domain. For example, we own estound.me because it works as a great marketing concept. Some of these domain names can be great marketing concepts. If you are a consulting firm, it may be beneficial to own .consulting. These also make for memorable URL’s and can be entertaining too!

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