3 Reasons Why Your Business Name is Important
So, we create websites and membership sites, why I am writing about why your business name is important?
Well, firstly we also do branding but ultimately your business name is going to impact on the domain name you choose and also your search engine optimisation (SEO) which is basically how well your website ranks on Google.
When people are choosing their business name we often find they’re trying to be too clever. They want to be different and to stand out and when they do that often they achieve quite the opposite. They go for a cool sounding word that loads of other people also picked because it sounds cool so then they put something on the start or end of it or try to spell it differently which means nobody will remember how to spell it.
Then in the pursuit of being unique they get more and more obscure and away from anything that resembles what their business does and so the business name doesn’t stick in people’s minds because there’s no point of reference to make it do that.
And in this process of trying to work out the name they speak to people like us to help them and these are the points we make and the discussions we have.
1. You need to make sure your business name will be good for SEO.
“I don’t think search rankings are going to be an issue. We will be getting work through existing contacts initially.”
Our response, “That’s brilliant but, what happens when one of those contacts says in a passing conversation to someone, ‘You should check out [enter over-used business name here]’ and then when they go to Google you don’t even come up on the first two pages for your own business name because it’s full of a more prolific business with that name which does something completely unrelated to what you do?”
2. You need to make sure you can get a domain name that matches your business name.
Again, if you’re using an already well used business name you’re going to struggle to get a decent domain name. You really want yourbusinessname.com if possible, because that’s what people will instinctively type in when they’re looking for you even if you’ve told them otherwise. People don’t listen or read most of the time.
It’s also a good idea to also get yourbusinessname dot then the TLD (the little bit at the end of the web address) for your country eg. .co.uk or .au and have this pointing to your website too.
Not only does this make it easy for people to find you, which makes them more likely to work with you, it also helps with SEO.
3. Ronsealing it really helps.
So, anyone younger than me may not get this reference but Ronseal is a home and garden DIY brand and all of their paints and anything else that comes in the tin are named with what they do and in the 90s they had a fab advertising campaign “It does exactly what it says on the tin”.
I believe that taking this approach with your business name is a great idea.
We didn’t do this with our main business name, 2nd Floor Designs Ltd. We called it that because our office when we started was on the second floor. Over the years we realised more and more people thought we were in the building industry or architects. So, when we created our website template service we wanted to trade under a name that made it very clear what we do. An elevator pitch in a name really – Ready Steady Websites®…
Our templates are there and ready to use.
They perform well and are nice and steady.
And they are websites.
The name also gives that feeling that you can get started and get a website out there quickly and as nobody else had anything like that ranking on Google, if you type it in now you get us and both the key domain names were there and available.
It’s worth thinking about social handles too.
Our friends at Yellow Tuxedo have created a brilliant little graphic to show how you should be using your business name across the whole of the web to make sure you have consistency and it’s easy for you to be found.
If you can get your business name as your domain name and as your social media handle across the platforms you are going to be using then that will really help with your organic SEO. Also, it definitely looks more professional if you use an email address linked to your domain name rather than a gmail address or similar.
So, if you’re starting a new business or you’re having a rebrand please try to keep these things in mind when deciding on a business name because in our experience marketing a business is a lot easier when you get it right.
Share on...
