A good domain name lets the audience hear it or see it briefly and they are able to find your website right away, but a bad domain name can take away precious time from the customer when they are at an important step in the research phase of making a purchase. To keep your domain simple, take these tips into account:

• Make sure your domain is easy to pronounce. This will make it possible to use radio ads and word-of-mouth sharing effectively. It also means it should be easy to read!
• Ensure it is simple to spell. Adding unnecessary letters, combining words in a confusing way, or even using spellings not common in your primary audience location (ex. “color” vs “colour”) will only add an extra layer of headache that will keep traffic away.
• Try to avoid repeated letters back to back, numbers, and excess punctuation. The amount of letters can cause confusion, such as Hill Landscaping to hilllandscaping.com.  Numbers are harder to memorize if they don’t hold specific meaning or aren’t commonplace and can cause confusion if they are spelled out. For punctuation, it adds to the complexity when spoken aloud, even if it makes the domain easier to read. For example, really-good-bread.com can be easily read, but when spoken it becomes too wordy to memorize.
• Put the customer first when thinking about your domain extension. The most common option, .com, is easily recognizable and what the general audience will input when typing in a domain name. The other common options such as .org, .gov, .edu, etc. can be great options as well, as long as it is fitting to your business and is promoted well. Vanity extensions do exist, such as .cafe or .casino, but can come across as unreliable and unprofessional.

Once you start brainstorming, it should be easy to weed out bad options after looking over the list above! Our team at Divine Marketing Group can always help set up your website so it’s on the right track. Reach out to us today at DivineMarketingGroup.com/contact to speak with our knowledgeable staff.