Domains for ecommerce site

[QwertyGroup]

Hi All,

I am trying to setup an ecommerce site and I wanted some general advice with regards to domains. Is it better to have a domain name related to a product if you have limited marketing and advertising budget. For example, I think if you have a domain like mobiles.com you are more likely to get hits when people search for it. However, if you have huge marketing and advertising budgets then you can call it something unique and advertise and people will serach under your name, like monkey.net or jarjar.co.uk etc.

Please advise me if my assumptions are correct or not.

Thank you, R

 

[awebapart.com]

Having your main target keywords in your domain can help with SEO (search engine optimisation) and search engine ranking, if you intend to get most of your visitors from the natural results of the search engines, but this is only one of around 200 factors that google uses to determine ranking, then again every little helps.

 

[Shoptistic.com]

Qwerty, you are indeed correct in that it can be more difficult to establish a completely unrelated brand without a significant marketing budget based around brand-awareness.

Subsequently, I agree with Paul that the possible benefits to SEO and to user-recognition should guide people towards a related domain name if a modest marketing budget has been allocated.

I hope this helps!

 

[Craig Dewe]

While there are SEO benefits to having the keywords in the domain name be careful when selecting one. A name has to be memorable and if you've had to do something like really-great-mobiles.com to get a domain it may just hurt your business and make it look spammy.

On the other hand, you don't need a huge marketing budget to brand a website. The name, the content, and some clever bootstrap marketing can have just the same results. You just replace money with time.

Be aware that building a business on the web takes time and good name recognition can be important down the road. If you look at the big companies on the web (that all started out small) their names have nothing to do with keywords. Google, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, craigslist, ...

My advice, take every possible opportunity to make your business stand out, domain included.

 

[Brightpearl]

Hi Qwerty
I think it is a good idea to have your main domain as something that represents your product for a number of reasons, as mentioned above (SEO and familiarity). There's nothing to stop you having a number of additional domains that point to the same website (or parts of the same website, perhaps running with a different layout or template), you can then use these extra domains to help you track your marketing campaigns.

For example you'd set up your main website (as in our case)
http://www.thisispearl.com
and then also have
http://www.pearlcart.com
for a particular product that you do

It's a great way of making sure that you are specific from the point of the customer but generic enough from your company point of view.

Another example; one of our clients has a shop in the Lake district; they have a shop with two main channels, climbing and running. They have two domains that point to different parts of the same website. This means that the climbing products don't scare away the runners looking for a running shop.

One disadvantage of having specific domains is that it does limit future growth perhaps; registering qwertykeyboardshop.com and building your brand around that, for example would make it harder to expand to selling mice and webcams too.

Amazon, eBay, DABS.com - they seem to do OK with a relatively generic domain name though!

Chris

 

[bridgat]

My advice is that you register a domain related to the product name you are selling. For example, if you sell digital camera, just pick a domain name something like digital-camera-store-uk.com. Search engine likes this. However, the domain will not get more attention/hits when a user searches for it.