The language of the web sometimes resembles Swahili and this is especially true with domain names. Coming up with a domain name with a .com suffix that matches your company name or offering is darn near impossible.
The first thing you have to ask yourself is should your business or product name match your URL? Conventional wisdom says yes, yet if you do a Google search for some of your favorite brands you will discover that many do not match. For example, if you enter the word “iPod” you get directed to www.apple.com/itunes. Ok, that makes sense.
Most people will do a Google search for a company or product instead of entering a URL. I have seen estimates that up to 80% of companies are found by web searches instead of directly entering a URL. There is a good argument that a perfect match does not really matter much anymore.
My personal take is that it makes sense to have a domain name that reflects your site or business. It is easier for your customers to remember. Now here is the hard part. Just about every two and three word combination for a .com URL is already taken. Don’t believe me? Go to Godaddy.com and enter any three word combo and you will discover that these URLs are already owned by someone else. Amazingly, this applies to the .net, .org, etc. They are almost all gone.
Unbelievable but true. This explains the trend of inventing company or product names. For example, www.Kijiji.com is an online classified ad website that competes with venerable Craigslist. “Kijiji” is Swahili for the word “village”. If you don’t believe me, go visit www.kijiji.com.
An alternative to Swahili or fabricating words is the use of long domain names. Kijiji could have used www.onlineclassifiedadwebsitethatcompeteswithCraigsList.com. I didn’t check but I am pretty sure this URL is available—cheap. But, can your customers remember it?
There is some evidence that longer URLs are easier to remember than single word inventions. Yet, it took me a few years to quit confusing Yahoo! with Wahoo; I just love their fish tacos or is it their pay-per-click advertising? No matter.
Hyphens or underscores can help you create shorter domain names but they confuse me and where is the underscore key on the key board anyway? Maybe you feel the same way.
Another workaround you can try is to add “the” to the beginning of a URL. I think this trick works if your business is known as “The BirdDog Group” which is the name of my publishing company. In this case, “the” has meaning and is logical.
The final challenge is to choose between .com, .net, .org, and the many others now available. Candidly, .com still has cache and is the suffix of choice for businesses. For those that do enter a URL in a search, 99 times out 100 they will enter it with a .com prefix. The choice for you is made easier since most .com URLs are already taken.
I wish you best in your domain name search. Or, as we say in Swahili, “Hakuna matata” which means no worries.
John Bradley Jackson
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