Small Business Marketing Plan – Choosing Domain Name

One of the fundimental steps for any small business marketing strategy and getting found on search engines like Google is choosing the right domain name.  Many business owners wind up choosing the wrong domain names for their business websites which often results in a failed or a very expensive marketing campaign with little to no results.  Spending a lot of effort and money and never quite reaching the first page of Google.

In this blog post you will learn:

• What is a domain name
• What is the difference between a good domain name and a bad domain name
• What you should avoid, that most business owners do wrong, when choosing a domain name and how to avoid it.
• The importance of having a keyword rich domain name as part of your small business marketing strategy.

What is a domain name?

A domain name is the part after the http://www.  and it ends in the .com  .net  .ca (.ca is for Canada) or other extentions.

An example of famous domain names are Google.com, Twitter.com, Facebook.com YouTube.com.

A good domain name is SEO friendly (keyword rich).  A Keyword rich domain name is key to any successful business marketing strategy online because it is the foundational step in ranking highly and getting found by your customers.

What you should avoid (i.e. bad domain names):

• Choosing a "cool' domain name for your business
• Using your company name, unless your business name is keyword rich.  

Lets use the example my company as an example. My company name is Fast Track Marketing Success however my domain name is SmallBusinessAdvertising.ca for my new business website, because of the number of searches for this keyword.  This one step allowed me to rank on the first page of Google for the "small business advertising" keyword in a matter of few weeks with a few posts for a brand new website.

At the time of this video I have less links then some of the more high authoroty wites however I have a 100% keyword density domane name which boosted me to show up higher on the first page of Google search results than websites like entrepreneur.com and about.com with a lot less content.

When choosing your domain name try to get an "exact match" domain name for best results eg. DogTraning.com

If you cannot get an "exact match" then your next option is to go for a "phrase match" eg.MyDogTraining.com or DogTrainingBlog.com

Idealy you want either an exact match or a phrase match domain name, but if you are unable to get those you may consider a "broad match" domain name. For example TrainingYourDog.com, the keyword "dog training" becomes "training your dog"

Having your keywords in your domain name will help you in your marketing efforts for your small online or local business. This is the first step foundational in search engine optimization.

Unless you have an extremly high marketing budget you should stick to these boring but SEO friendly and keyword rich domain names. Do not be tempted by cleaver or cool domain names.  They are not worth the hassle and the only person who will see it and knows it exists is you.

Just by following the simple tips will allow you to rank faster in search engines like google, save you a lot of effort, time and money when you are trying to achieve high search engine rankings for your local business or online business.

You can find the best domain name from doing your market research. If you have not yet done any market and keyword research check out my video tutorial for "Doing Your Market Research".

For small business marketing  and SEO help click here Search Engine Optimization For Your Small Business

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