Buying a domain name for your business can be a tricky thing at times. Selecting a domain name that is short and memorable, and perhaps has some keywords in it can really make a difference.
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Hello, I'm Lynda from Scullywag Services and
I'd like to talk to you about domain names.
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So a domain name is just your website address.
So, for example, my domain name is scullywag.com.
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If you go to a website browser and type in
scullywag.com, it takes you to my website. If you
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don't already have a business name or a brand name
you might be thinking... hmm what am I going to
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do? What will I call myself? What do I want people
to type in before they arrive at my website?
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So a couple of ideas... try and keep it short
and sweet. You don't want it something too long.
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You want it to be nice and memorable. They
do give you about 63 characters but I mean
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nobody wants to type 63 characters. As the
meme says "ain't nobody got time for that",
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plus you know the chances are that they might
mistype something and that's another thing,
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you know you don't want something that's a little
bit too confusing. Like if it's a word that's
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really easily misspelt, probably not a good
idea. Another thing too and I was reading this,
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I was kind of boning up before I came in here to
tell you all about it, but homophones.. and I was
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thinking about this. Like if you had like "hole
in one", say a golf course... h-o-l-e, but you know
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hole in one is probably gone. So you know, you
might be thinking hmm well w-h-o-l-e it's whole it
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works. No, it doesn't. You know because nobody is
going to think oh yeah I'm going to type in ....it
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was hole in one.com I'm sure. You know, they're not
going to think oh it was w-h-o-l-e. You know. Yeah,
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no. That doesn't work either, it needs to make
sense. You know, unless you've actually made a big
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play in your social media and your advertising
that... no, it's spelt this way. Another way is to get
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keywords in. Say, for example, I'm a website
designer. If I could get say something like
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web design in a domain name... so I
don't know ...brilliant web design or
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fantastic web design or affordable web
design. If I could get that in a domain name
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that would probably cost me a lot of money
because whoever owns that would be charging
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big, big bucks for it. But let's say for
argument's sake I was able to get ahold of it...
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what I could do, and this would be like a really
hard choice because I mean, I'm really attached
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to my domain name, because it's very personal
to me, it's based on a nickname, but I could
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either have scullywag.com forwarded to... what did
I decide the name was? ... brilliant web design
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or I could have brilliant web design forwarded
to scullywag.com. So when somebody typed in
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brilliantwebdesign.com it actually went to the
scullywag.com website and it would say that up
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the top. Because the reason we do that is because
Google doesn't like duplicate content. If we had
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two websites with identical content, Google's
like... well what's going on here? Somebody's
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plagiarizing something, you know and yeah
Google doesn't want lots of cookie-cutter
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websites with exactly the same stuff, you know,
exactly the same text. It's like, you know,
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these universities, just like.... no this ain't
happening... this is not acceptable. So, yeah,
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that's what we do and there's no reason
why you couldn't have several different
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domain names forwarding to one main domain
name. In fact, that's what we do with some
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of my clients in Australia. Some of them
have a dot-com version of their domain name
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and a com.au version and what we do, we just have
the dot-com.au version go to the dot-com version.
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I do have some other clients that are only within
Australia, they aren't for a worldwide audience,
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they service just people within Australia.
So in that case we just leave it as a com.au.
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Another option too is location. So let's just say,
for example, I am a web designer but I only work
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within the Brisbane area. That's not the case,
I have clients worldwide but if I did, I might
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want to try and get Brisbane in there. So it might
be Brisbane web design and if that was the case,
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you know, I would probably get scullywag.com to
forward to Brisbane web design because if you're
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in a specific area getting that location
keyword in there is just brilliant. Oh,
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I kind of touched on a little bit of country-level
domain names. So for example in Australia dot com
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dot au is the country-level domain name. I think
in Canada it's dot ca. I know the UK it's dot
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co dot uk. I think Germany is dot
de. It's just different countries,
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it's their own version. Usually and I know in
Australia at the very least, if you are going to
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use the dot com dot au version you need to have
some sort of business registration. So you need
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at least an ABN in Australia before you can
register a dot com.au version of a domain name.
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Another thing you might want to
do is check social media handles.
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So just say I hadn't bought scullywag but I
decided that I wanted to buy scullywag.com,
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I might be a little bit disappointed after
I bought it to go and look for scullywag on
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social media. I might find that... oh I can't get
that handle on Facebook. It's already taken on
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Instagram. It's already taken on Twitter.
So if you're kind of tossing up a couple
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of different domain names, that might be
a deciding factor. Go have a look and see
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if the social media handles are available.
If that's something that's important to you.
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There is a website that will actually search
a whole heap or it used to. I'll try if I
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can and dig that up and drop that in the links
below, if I remember or if I'm able to find it.
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Another thing you need to be aware of too is
a domain name is something that needs to be
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renewed on a regular basis. You may have paid for
one year's domain name renewal, in which case,
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in a year's time you'll need to pay it again...
or I think they allow you to pay up to 10 years
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and usually the longer time period that you're
paying for in advance, usually, you get a little
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bit of a discount on the yearly fee. If you do
forget to pay or if you miss the renewal notice
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that can cause a lot of problems because what
happens is the domain name, it doesn't just become
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available again, there's actually what's called a
redemption period which is about between 30 and 40
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days depending on the domain name registrar...
and yeah that can be really painful because
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I have one client that missed renewing their
domain name and it had gone past what was
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considered, what would you call it... a grace period and
they wanted over a hundred dollars to allow her to
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renew that domain name again and she actually
decided to wait them out. You know it was going
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into the redemption period, she'd have to wait 30
or 40 days but then she'd be able to buy it again.
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The only problem with that is that if somebody
else had been waiting around and was aware of this
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happening, and you can do this, you can look
up when the domain name is up for renewal...
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some will not have the details there but
a lot of them do... and if they're keeping
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an eye on that... they're kind of hmm, okay
that's interesting and... actually I think
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there was some case not long ago. I think within
Australia, I think our prime minister actually,
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somebody bought his domain name, which
wouldn't have lasted long because, you know,
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it kind of... that comes under trademark
and copyright I suppose but yeah...There
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was somebody else too there was some big
company just recently...I forget who it was
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but they forgot to renew their domain name and
somebody else snapped it up. You know... people...
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you just don't know what people are watching and
you know waiting for... but she was fortunate,
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my client, she was able to regain her
dot com version. So now she's got the
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two domain names and we just have the dot
com dot au version forwarded to the dot com.
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Anyway, I hope that's helpful.
Yeah so if it was please
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like, comment... if you've got any questions,
let me know and I'll be back next time. Bye
Link to an article about the Prime Minister of Australia temporarily losing his domain name – https://www.domainregistration.com.au/news/2018/1022-australian-pm-domain.php
Google Argentina forget to renew their domain name – https://au.pcmag.com/news/86860/web-designer-buys-googles-argentina-domain-name-for-3
Some other domain names that failed to be renewed in time – https://whoapi.com/blog/5-all-time-domain-expirations-in-internets-history/
Site to search if a domain name and its relevant social media handles are available – https://www.namecheck.com/