How Choosing A Domain Name Can Affect Your Website Authority

Three words: Exact Match Domains.

What Exact Match Domains Are And Google’s Problems With It

Simply put, EMDs are websites that use exact search terms as their domain names. For example, if you are doing a search on “wholesale toys in America”, you would have seen a website that has wholesaletoysinamerica.com as their domain name.

But Google realized that a domain alone should not dictate a website’s ranking; it needs other elements to support it. They say that most websites were not providing high-quality content, and therefore thought that websites should be given a high ranking based on quality and content, instead of just keyword use.

So in 2012, Google updated their algorithm which would prioritize websites that show relevance and value on top of an acceptable keyword density. Which means websites who relied on it too much quickly dropped like flies. In effect, it seems creating a domain name does not have the weight that it had on search engines before, right?

Well, that is not exactly the case.

Harnessing The Power Of Branding

While domain names do not have a significant effect on your ranking, it does offer an advantage that some of your online marketing efforts will be unable to give you in a short amount of time. It is establishing your brand and building credibility through the domain.

The idea is that you will get a boost in ranking through what is called a brand signal. Especially if you are a small business, you want every aspect of your enterprise to contribute to your branding. So make sure you are able to do the following:

• Create a memorable domain name, but keep it relevant to your industry.
• Try avoiding putting too many keywords because it is an inconvenience.
• You do not have to use keywords in the domain, but you can fully utilize it on the website.

How To Create A Brandable Domain

Do not make it too complicated
What you want is to appeal to people who are already keen on your industry, and then bring in potential customers right after. So reference words or phrases used in your niche group to get the attention of people already interested in the kind of products or services you are offering. They will easily recognize this and decide to check you out.

But what this means is the domain name should not be too obscure because it makes it difficult to remember. Note that your online efforts will eventually target people may not have even the slightest interest in what you are offering. To ensure that while you are true to the nature of your business, you are still able to rake in prospective customers.

Make It Concise

Keeping the domain name short helps in retention. If you can, limit it to, at most, 3 words only.

Choose the .com extension

The .com extension is the best choice if you are a new and fairly unknown business. However, if you really want to buy other extensions like .org, co.uk, or .net, make sure to redirect all of it to your .com extension.