Considering how big the SEO industry has become in recent years, it’s no mystery that building a strong online presence is among the top priorities for a lot of brands. But sometimes, this enthusiasm drives them to go overboard and do things that are counter-productive like:
Using creative top-level domains
Remember when .com, .net and .org were pretty much all you could choose from? Well, those days are long gone. Today, we have a whole lot of overly specific top level domains or TLDs at our disposal. Are you a wedding planner? You can now get a .wedding or .weddings TLD!
Sounds pretty cool, right? Unfortunately, these new TLDs do not come without a few issues. Among them is the fact that there’s an enormous possibility that your customers would type in .com (or any other more traditional TLD) first because it’s more familiar. This means that if, for example, you chose a domain name like www.planyour.wedding, a website called www.planyourwedding.com could unknowingly (or purposely) steal all your traffic just because your customers are more inclined to typing web addresses in this format.
But what if you want a unique domain name? Well, you could get one, but be ready to spend heavily on SEO and marketing to make sure that your customers, both existing and potential, would know where to go.
Being everywhere at once
If you want to engage your customers, you have to be where they are—and this means being on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and any other social platform that your target market likes to hang out in. The problem with this set-up, however, is that it can be overwhelming for your customers. They don’t know where the best place is to connect with you. Having a whole lot of different online addresses makes getting in touch with you seem like a complicated process.
You can fix this by making it clear to your customers what each of your online accounts is for. Or you can simply drive them all to a central location, like, your website, for example, and just use your social accounts as a platform to do that.
Using a different name
Another thing that can make it more challenging for your customers to find you online is the use words other than your brand name as your website’s URL.
Let’s say you sell a product called Smarter Phones. You could get creative and use any of these as your web address:
- www.getsmarter.com
- www.smarterisbetter.com
- www.choosesmarter.com
- www.smartphonessuck.com
- www.smartisnotenough.com
The thing with this approach, however, is that while it may seem cool, you have to keep in mind that your customers will most likely search for www.smarterphones.com first. In fact, there’s a slight chance that they’d guess any of the five examples we listed above. So, unless you must get creative with your website’s URL, just go with your brand name. Otherwise, just as with using original TLDs, you must be prepared to do some serious SEO and marketing to get your creative URL to stick.
Stick to the basics
In most cases, using more traditional and intuitive web addresses and being clear as to where you want your customers to find you on the web are your best bet to building a strong online presence. Getting creative with your website’s URL and joining various social platforms, while not inherently wrong, requires a bit more help to work just as well.
We’d love to hear your thoughts! Share them with us in the comments!