Not buying the exact-match .com domain.
Agency purchased an abbreviated domain name but left the exact-match .com available for others. The abbreviated domain was fewer characters than the exact-match (which can be great), but in this case wasn’t fit for use where it would be most used, by newscasters and podcasters, and was less well suited than the exact-match domain—which was available at no markup.
Going public before buying a domain.
If a moderately serious business idea you’re about to share publicly holds more than $20 in potential commercial value, buy the .com domain if it is available. Going public includes everything from tweeting, to filing articles of incorporation, and we’ve surprisingly seen both.
Not buying the singularized and pluralized versions of a .com domain.
Related to the exact-match is the mistake of not minding the “s.” If your company is “Todds Repairs,” you should own ToddsRepairs.com and ToddsRepair.com. You won’t need two websites, but will instead choose one as the primary domain and redirect the other site to it.
Similarly, if your firm uses Roman numerals in its name, buy the numeric-valued name as well.
Not mulling over your company name and domain name in tandem—for hours or days if needed.
Your domain name and your company name go hand in hand. Perhaps “Todd Repairs” (the active rather than passive) is worth considering as your company name. Either way, owning both is a best-bet if possible.
This mistake sounds innocent (and not all that important), but the longer and deeper you dive into both your company name and domain name together, the more likely you are to find a vastly better domain.
Client had a long-winded domain name with some key terms spelled out in full while others were abbreviated. We thought this over a million ways to Sunday and ended up with a truly perfect four-letter domain name.
Buying an alternate TLD because the .com is too costly.
Yes, there are limits to what makes sense in domain expenses. But the error to be aware of is not securing the .com domain at a reasonable but high price, and then building an entire company IRL on an alternate TLD. The longer you do so, the more valuable the .com becomes. If your ideal .com is worth under $20,000 right now, it’s well worth considering, and you can buy some great domain names on a monthly payment plan.
Buying useless TLDs to “build a moat” around your business.
The .com TLD is preferred 9 out of 10 times. If you’ve landed on something you feel is incredibly valuable and you’re committed to it long-term, you may want to “build a moat” around it to some extent. You can very safely do so without buying every TLD. You typically do not need the .shop, .blog, .tech, .pro, .biz, .online, .us, and most other TLDs. (Not only do you not need them, many of them are widely considered inferior or unprofessional.) A good moat can mean buying as little as the .com and .net domains (and key pluralizations / alternate spellings, as mentioned above.)
The two questions you need to mull over here are:
- Where will a client or customer who does not know us at all assume we live online?
- What versions or iterations of our primary domain name would be valuable to competitors? Or would prevent us from “cornering” the digital landscape?
Please do not assume that cease and desist letters or later legal action will help you here, buying a $12 domain name to “own the whole lot” is by far the best scenario. We’ve seen SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) once dominated by single entities (products or companies) become cluttered with vaguely related competitors locally and across the country due to domain name matches. There are dozens of ways to get around the trademark and other laws you believe will protect you. [Pages 8-10, “Protecting Your Trademark,” USPTO.]
Buying innumerable domain names to “cover all bases.”
You’ll do best to thoroughly work over both your business name and your domain name in tandem. But just as you can make the mistake of not buying pluralizations or iterations of a domain name, you can also easily pendulum swing far beyond value—letting domain name availability alone be the sole factor in deciding what to name your product or company. Settling a product name or business name, then buying relevant domain names is usually the best sequence.
Not checking username availability on key social platforms.
It’s getting harder and harder to find a perfect .com domain name for which all social media handles are available. Which is alright. The mistake here is simply not checking if suitable and mostly uniform usernames are available across at least YouTube and the social platforms that are most important to your business—usually Instagram and/or TikTok, and LinkedIn.
Not searching (Google, Bing, ChatGPT) to see what the domain name returns in search right now.
Search Google, Bing, and ChatGPT to see what entity or idea these search engines and LLMs turn up right now. That helps isolate possible trademark problems, as well as get an idea of what it might be like to start ranking for your own brand name or company name over time.
II. How to Choose Domains for a Product or Business
When you type Google.com or WhiteHouse.gov into a browser, “.com” and “.gov” are the TLDs — the Top-Level Domains.
TLD = The final part of a domain name that follows the last period or dot: “.com,” “.co,” “.org,” etc.
We rarely think about TLDs because we use search engines so often, and because both the .com and .gov above serve the same purpose.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t differences between them, but that both .com and .gov will get you to a website.
As a business owner, you’ll want to know a bit more about TLDs:
- .com is the best TLD all around. Best = most standard, most widely accepted, most coveted.
- The problem with .coms is that the best of them are taken, or are on sale for 4-6 figures.
- So .net is generally second-best, if you can’t get a close enough match with a .com.
- $10,000-$20,000 for a good .com is an investment well worth considering (we’ll define what a “good .com” is in a second.)
- .org is the best TLD if your product or service is nonprofit or is more socially-serving than the average business. (A food bank, a donation center or service, a trust, or institution.)
Think of a website as a house, and a domain name as being its street address. Except in the online world, you can move your “house” (website) almost instantly to any “address” (domain) that you own, and you can have multiple addresses for one house.
You don’t need to, but you can, and there are occasions where it makes sense to do so.
Domain names also cost roughly $12 per year, so you can buy as many as you think you need to put a moat around your product or service.
But how many do you need and of which exactly?
Well, there are more than 1,500 TLDs and you don’t need even a fraction of them. (The most common are .com, .net, .org, .gov, .edu, .io, and .ai).
.com is the best TLD in 98 out of 100 cases.
Buy the .com if it’s available, the .net if it’s not, or the .io, .co, or .org if they’re a “domain-product fit.”
If they (.net, .io, .co, .org) aren’t great, you can add dashes between words (“johns-cleaning.com”), but you’ll need to weigh your options carefully, because you will forever be reading that dash aloud to clients, in videos, and on air: “Visit us at johns dash cleaning dot com.”
If at all possible, you should avoid dashes in a domain name.
Maybe JohnsCleaningService.com, or JohnsCleaners.com are better? (And hey, is that John with or without an h?)
The TLDs .pro, .tech, .shop, .store, .blog, .news, .biz, .online, .inc, .art, .wiki, aren’t worth buying in 99% of cases.
But .art, .store, .clothing, .app and others might be a good fit.
The difference is that the first series here are bad second-rate TLDs for something that should be a .com, while the second series makes sense for certain uses—there’s a specific association or domain-product fit in .art and .app for example.
Then say your product or company name aloud.
Listen for alternate interpretations—ways people could assume your product or business name is spelled that are different from what it actually is.
Is Pixie spelled Pixie or Pixy? Get both domain names if you can.
Having written this two years ago, I was surprised to see no less than billionaire legal titan John Morgan advised similarly more than 10 years ago with respect to what was then the in vogue “search engine” — Directory Assistance, the old 411:
“Now, if this little drill [of calling directory assistance and asking to be transferred to your own law firm] hasn’t driven you crazy yet, what if you are a person whose name has an odd spelling or multiple spellings? Is it Stine or Stein? Is it Cook or Kuck? Is it Kelly or Kelley? Why is this important? It is essential that directory assistance operators not only have the correct spelling of your name but alternative spellings as well…. For those of you with impossible names like [New York PI Attorney] Steve Schwartzapfel, [Founding Partner at Shaw Lewenz] Ed Zebersky, and [Ohio Super Lawer] Frank Piscitelli, your challenge has just begun. It is not only incumbent upon you to make sure your name is listed, but you must also consider that there may be many alternative phonetic ways to find your name in directory assistance. This overlooked exercise can cost firms and individuals millions of dollars during their career.” — John Morgan, “You Can’t Teach Hungry; Creating the Multimillion Dollar Law Firm” © 2011 by John Morgan
Still valid today. But as far as domain name spellings, your goal in acquiring them goes a step beyond ensuring your potential customers can find you. It also ensures your potential competitors can’t build empires on them that then outrank you in search.
Is your company name pluralized by default?
Is it “Solution” or “Solutions”?
“Service” or “Services”? (Get both.)
Meta’s latest app acquisition, Threads, lived at threads.net before it eventually bought the .com.
Some $100-million companies live on the .co, because the .com was taken by a company in another vertical.
Both companies did and do just fine, because we all use search engines so often we rarely even type in TLDs.
But the .com is still superior.
Get the shortest .com you can that directly ties to your product or company name.
Naming a company
“Naming a company is excruciating. A good name should be positive, memorable, pronounceable, and unique. And you don’t just need a name, you also need a domain name that ends in .com.” The drive for domain names is the reason so many new companies’ names look like a spoonful of alphabet soup.”
That’s Jim McKelvey, cofounder of Square, in The Innovation Stack (2020).
Square, the payment processor McKelvey cofounded, lives at SquareUp.com, while Square.com—which I imagine the company only purchased later—now forwards there.
McKelvey says the “naming numbness” for Square lasted two weeks, during which they “tried all the obvious commerce terms and combinations thereof, such as combining the words payment and happiness to get Payness.”
“See, it’s hard,” he says.
Two weeks.
What do search and LLMs say right now?
Lastly, one of the more important considerations these days when it comes to company and product names is:
What appears on search engines and in LLMs right now when you look up that word or name?
Because you will forever be competing with that company or product for page one real estate.
So the less “branded” your future product or future company’s name already is in Search, the better.
But, like finding a good .com, that’s becoming harder and harder.
[That’s not terrible, is often unavoidable, and you can even use this to your advantage. So don’t abandon anything that’s “close to a competitor,” but it’s a bit beyond this topic.]
What a good .com is
Briefly, a good .com domain name is:
- Short; as few letters as logically possible.
- Memorable; if your company/product name alone isn’t available as a .com, adding get, go, up, or another short word is an option.
- Relevant; to your brand, product, or company.
- Non-hyphenated.
- Spelled phonetically.