Selecting a domain name for your business
Have you decided on a domain name for your business yet?
We can provide sensible advice on domain name selection, spelling, possible alternatives and availability.
Your domain name is quite important, you will need to remember it, type it a lot, write it out, spell it over the phone and potentially it will be the suffix for your email address.
It may be worth considering the name of your business based on what domain names are available too.
Our general principal is, concise, easily spelt, simple to read domain names are best.
If you are thinking about your domain name registration feel free to give us a call or email so that we can assist.
How To Choose Domain Name for an Australian business
Choosing a domain name is an important decision for your business since you will need to write it down, type it, give it to people on the phone and put it in your advertising. You are going to be seeing, spelling and communicating this name a lot. There is really no question that the web is the medium of trade and business, if you are not on the internet then you are missing out. Even the most unlikely of businesses can benefit from at least providing a page with their contact details in case existing customers want to find them. It is a really good idea to choose the right Australia domain name. There are number of issues you should consider before finalising a domain name to register for your business.
Pick a close match to your business name
Ideal domain name will be exact match with the business name but not everyone is able to choose the domain name matching business name due to the fact that some other business has already registered the Australia domain name. In such a situation one has to try some other alternatives.
Length of your domain name
It is always good to have domain name thats short in length as it is easy to remember for your customers. But it should represent you business name and short form of the name should have relevance to your business name.
Possible spelling mistakes of your domain name
It is a good idea to consider what are the most likely misspellings of your primary domain name. If you have a widely known brand then you might want to register some variations of your domain name, or at least register the main top level domains such as .com .net .net.au .com.au so that your competitors cannot. We wouldn’t advise you to get to carried away with this because it can get expensive if you have a lot of domains and for no real purpose, especially if your brand or business is not like a national brand name.
Extra domain names for mini-sites
Sometimes we will recommend that if you do have additional domain names that we put separate but smaller websites on them and get them into the search results so that at least they have a chance of getting you some enquiries.
Additional domain names won’t help with search engine results
The search engines expect you to pick one main domain name per website. Any additional domain names are generally ignored, at worst you would be diluting the search engine relevance of your main domain name. So pick your primary domain name and stick with that for all your link building, branding, blogging and social media connections.
If you require any help in choosing the right domain for your business, we would be happy to assist you.
Rules for registering a .com.au or .net.au domain name
To register a .com.au or .net.au domain name a business must have an ABN or state business name registration number or trademark number. The connection to the domain name is pretty loosely allowed to be anything. It used to be quite a strict process in the 90′s but these days pretty much any business can register any domain name so long as its not some other companies trademark. Tthere are four key requirements:
- you should be able to show some sort of connection to the domain name, either by way of your business name, a product, acronym, brand etc
- you can’t register the name of a city as your domain name
- a .au domain name can be 2 to 63 letters, and words can be separated by hyphens, but not spaces (most 2 and 3 letter domains are taken already)
- it would be unwise to register a domain name that is a competitor business name or trademark
If you are really interested in what the ‘reasons’ for being allowed to register a .au domain name are you can see them here: .au domain name rules.