How to Pick a Domain Name That Doesn’t Suck

September 30, 2022

Don’t let your domain name suck.

Your domain name is the Rand McNally for your business. 

It’s like the great big map your dad had in the 80s when you went on family vacation, and it showed every turn to make and where to go.

Your domain name is the navigator for your business’s digital footprint.

Your domain name has a set of records in it that tells the Internet where to send visitors when they type your domain into a browser. These records are called IP addresses. Sticking with the map analogy, think of your domain name like your street address, and your IP address like your longitude and latitude. The domain name is the shortcut to the longitude and latitude. 

It’s important to get a good one, because we’ve all dealt with bad ones, spelling them on repeat on the phone, giving up and sending an email with a link instead. If you’re currently stuck doing this, it is a sign your domain name sucks. Let’s change that. 

What makes an awesome domain name?

There are simple steps you can take to get a great domain name, perfect for your company or organization. 

• Choose the right domain name extension
• Make sure your domain name makes sense and is as close to your organization name as possible
• Keep your domain name short
• If your company name is hard to spell, buy variations of your domain name
• Make sure it can be read easily, and doesn’t say any bad things
• Purchase general domain names available for your industry and location, but get your company name as well
• Choose a registrar, and stay up to date with your payments

1. Get the right extension. 

There are several domain name extensions you can use, .net, .com, .org, .us, each are suited for different types of businesses. For a catchall domain extension, you definitely want. .com. Your customers or clients are going to automatically type in YourBusinessName.com.

If you are a nonprofit, then .org is perfectly acceptable. As a matter of fact, if you have a .com, then people may type in .org and not be able to get to you. 

To solve that, you may want to buy more than one extension. 

If you’re a nonprofit, buy .com and .org. If you’re a business, just buy .com.

Another popular extension, .us,  makes sense for some people because they have the perfect domain with .us. It might be their exact business name, but it can be tricky.

With .us, the domain extension we sometimes see is .us.com, and a lot of hosting companies and registrars will not accept that. We are seeing it a little more widely accepted these days, but if you do any business outside the United States in any way, shape or form, it closes you off to that. I don’t recommend using a .us or a .us.com. 

There was a lot of dot netting back in the day, but now it’s mostly reserved for technology and internet companies.

 If you’re an Internet service provider, you should definitely have a .net. For example, here in town, we have socket.net, tranquillity.net, centurytel.net and charter.net. Everyone knows they are all internet service providers. If you are a business who does not provide a tech or internet service, you should not have .net as your primary domain name extension.

The main takeaway here is, if you can have the .com you should have the .com. It’s what people are going to put at the end of your domain name anyway. 

2. Your domain name should be as close to your company name as possible.

It needs to make sense for your business. Because you’re paying to advertise your company. 

A lot of times, people will use one of their services as their domain name. You can certainly make it your main domain name, but you should also own your business name. For example, we could have WebDesignColumbiaMo.com, and MayeCreate.com, which could both go to the same place. 

However, day-to-day, you’re working with your clients as your company. They won’t remember to go to WebDesignColumbiaMo.com to get your contact information, they’ll look up MayeCreate. 

If there’s a general domain name, with your service or area, like WebDesignColumbiaMo.com, that would be a fine one to buy. 

Remember you don’t have to buy more than one. If your company name is nice and short, and you can get a .com, just go with that. But having more than one is good too.

3. A shorter name is better.

We call ourselves MayeCreate Design, but we felt like it was better to get MayeCreate.com than MayeCreateDesign.com or MayeCreateWebDesign.com. 

For the most part, the shorter the better. The last thing you want is a domain name that doesn’t fit on your business card. Make sure your domain name is short enough to where you don’t have to spend an entire minute writing it out.

If you have a long company name, you may want multiple domain names. 

We used to host almost all of our websites with a company called Tranquility. They had two domains: tranquility.net and tranq.net. The acronym was so much easier. We would talk to clients and say, it’s T R A N Q .net, and they would get it no problem. But somehow the I L I T Y was just too much. So they had both. It made sense for them since their business name was both a longer word and a word people probably don’t use every day. 

4. Buy multiple domain names if your company name is spelled weirdly. 

Time to pick on ourselves a bit. 

Our name is MayeCreate, M-A-Y-E Create. There is another MayCreate without the E in Tennessee offering the same services we do. If we could get ahold of their domain name, we would, but we can’t because people often misspell our name. And if they misspell it in our domain but haven’t been to our site before they might do business with the other company! In this case, having multiple domain names makes sense, since our company name is uncommonly spelled. 

For example, if your business is called Bontrager Homes *disclaimer, this is completely made up, not one of our actual clients* you could have a couple of different spellings and even the phonetic spelling of it for your domain names. 

Without the additional domains we’ve had to run Google ads campaigns to scoop up traffic for  clients with strangely spelled names, super long names or multiple business names and that costs more money. 

One of our clients uses two names for different parts of their business but their clients think it’s all the same business because it resides under one roof. They have EyeDentity Eyewear, their optical business and Williams and Associates Eyecare, the name under which the optometrists work. People search for their business as “Williams Eyewear”, “EyeDentity Eyecare” and a handful of other names. They are perfect candidates for multiple domains.

So, if you know your name is hard to spell, buy a couple of different domain names. 

5. Check if your domain name is funny, but not in a good way.

Think about your domain name like a hashtag. A hashtag doesn’t work if you can’t read the individual words or if they make other words. 

I have a funny example for this one, and it’s a company I love. 

Delta Companies is an acquaintance of ours and their domain name is Delta Cos .com, deltacos.com, Del Tacos .com. I literally think of their business as del tacos. Every time I see them, I say, “hey, you’re the del tacos folks!” They laugh about it too, so I feel like we can laugh about it with them. And I love tacos. 

Before you buy a domain name, write it out so you can see it. 

Have someone else read it too, to double check. You don’t want your domain name to say bad things. Del tacos is fun, but pen island is less fun, if you catch my drift. Don’t believe me? Just write it out on a piece of paper, all one word. 

6. Sometimes you’ll need general and specific domain names.

Let’s say that you’ve gone through the whole process of choosing a domain name, and you really want to have JohnDoeHomes.com, but it isn’t available. Here’s how you can remedy the situation. 

For New Businesses

If your company is new, go out to the domain registrar and search for the name you want to see if it already exists before you name your company. You can also check with the Secretary of State to make sure your company can be registered under the name you want to use. 

For Existing Businesses

Consider adding a location as long as it’s representative of where you do business. So, if you do business in Missouri, it’s okay to have JohnDoeHomesMo.com. 

This works as long as JohnDoeHomes.com is not another company who provides homebuilding services in your location. Maybe they’re a realtor, in a completely different location, which would be totally fine. They’re selling homes, you’re building them and you’re not in the same location so if someone lands on the other company’s site they will know it’s not you. However, if the company whose domain you want does the same service as you, or they are near your area, you probably want something that differentiates you a little bit more.

In that case, you could do:

• John Doe Homes Builder
• John Doe Custom Homes
• John Doe Remodeler

Adjust the domain to make it work for you.

Register your new, doesn’t suck domain name.

To register a domain name for your organization you can use one of a number of different registrars across the internet. We prefer GoDaddy for domain names. Though we don’t use them for any other services, the domain name functionality in their website is really easy to use.

We also have clients that use Network Solutions and Tucows. Or you can look at HostGator or Name.com. The list goes on and on. Most of them sell the same domains, so it doesn’t necessarily matter which one you use. 

Keep your login information somewhere you can find it.

What does matter is buying it from a registrar, and paying for it on a regular basis. The key, if you’re going to renew it for a long time, is to hold onto your login information and know where it lives. Otherwise, your domain name expires, and then it gets bought by porn sites. It happened to one of our clients. 

They didn’t want us to handle their domain name renewal for them, which is a totally fine decision to make for your company. However, if you choose to take care of it yourself, you have to be a responsible domain name owner.  

Skip the privacy upsell.

One of the options that pops up every time you register a domain is whether or not to purchase privacy protection for your domain. It does cost more to register your domain name privately. The service blocks people from seeing who owns your domain and other information about the domain itself..

We prefer to register domains normally, because there are ways around the privacy protection that allow people to find out who owns the domain name anyway. At most, you’ll get a spam letter saying you need to pay another domain renewal. It won’t be from the company you bought your domain name from, so you’ll know it’s spam. If you receive one of those, throw it in the trash, we have a whole podcast about it. 

We also prefer not to do it privately because the next time somebody needs to look at your domain name and see where it’s been purchased from, how long you have till it expires or any other information about it, they won’t be able to. If you leave the privacy off, it’s easier to find your domain name in the future.

When it comes to domain names, here are the important things to remember. 

• Your domain name is the navigator for your business’s digital footprint.
• Your domain name extension should match your business type. If you’re a nonprofit organization, buy both .com and .org. 
• Make sure your domain name makes sense and is as close to your organization name as possible
• Keep your domain name short
• If your company name is hard to spell, buy variations of your domain name
• Purchase general domain names available for your industry and location, but get your company name as well
• Make sure it can be read easily, and doesn’t say any bad things
• Choose a registrar, and stay up to date with your payments

Now, go forth and confidently select a domain name for your organization that doesn’t suck. 

If you want an opinion on your domain name, send us an email to info@mayecreate.com. Tell us what you’re looking at. We’d love to hear what you’re thinking about and send us options. We’ll give you back an opinion.