Photo credit: Sydney Line Marketing
When beginning a commercial enterprise, one of the most important steps to undertake is to choose a suitable name for your company. It can take days, weeks or months to choose the ideal name, factoring in what you do, what sounds best, names of the founders, and plenty of other considerations. But suppose you have chosen the ideal name, and in the course of trying to find a domain for your company website, you discover the name is no longer available.
Now what?
Option 1: Change Your Name
Finding a different name after you’ve already chosen one can feel self-defeating, but it can also serve your best interests by finding a more unique moniker. Try using the UD.com Namecheck tool to search for available domains.
Option 2: Choose a Descriptive Domain
Have you noticed that many movies these days register domain names that use the word movie? This summer’s Cameron Diaz film, Knight and Day has the same title as a restaurant chain, which already owns www.knightandday.com. So if you’re looking for information about the action movie, you can visit www.KnightandDaymovie.com. This tactic lets the movie use its name for a domain, but specifies that this domain is about the film.
If you own a consulting firm, and the company name is taken already, consider registering CompanyNameConsulting.com. By adding an extra descriptor to the domain name, you can both keep your name and optimize your SEO presence. Keywords can help you reach a more targeted audience.
Option 3: Try an Alternate Spelling
Digg.com, the social bookmarking site, couldn’t register www.dig.com when it first launched (it’s owned by Disney), and by adding the second “g” to its name, the company ended up creating a distinctive brand. There are plenty of other sites that have strange spellings to stand out. However, beware of the dropped vowel trend (i.e. Flickr, Namechk) because it can be confusing to people who are searching for the “correct spelling” of your company name.
Option 4: Use a Tagline or Phrase for Your Domain
Recently a new company called “Unvarnished” launched, allowing people to anonymously review colleagues and friends. Too bad for the company, www.unvarnished.com was already registered to a blog run by Travis Smith. So instead, the company used the phrase “getUnvarnished” as the basis for their domain name. Or in the case of musician Dave Carroll, who is best known for his rant against United Airlines for breaking his guitar in transit, you can visit his site at www.unitedbreaksguitars.com.
