Your domain name is the address people type to reach your website, like yourfirm.in. It will go on your visiting cards, your office board, your WhatsApp profile and every hoarding you put up. It will probably outlive your current logo.
You can change it later, but it is painful. Every printed card becomes wrong, and the credit Google has built up for the old address has to be carefully moved across. An hour of thought now saves all of that.
Start with the name people already use
The best domain is usually your business name, as your clients already say it. Suppose people in Mysuru know your firm as Kaveri Homes, a made-up name for this example. Then kaverihomes.in is better than any clever phrase.
A simple test: say the address once over the phone to someone who has never heard it. Can they type it correctly without asking how to spell it? If they have to ask "is that with a double e?" or "is there a hyphen?", keep looking.
Shorter is better, but clear beats short. A long name that is easy to say works. A short jumble of consonants that nobody can remember does not.
.in, .co.in or .com
The ending of the address matters less than people think.
.in and .co.in both mark you as an Indian business, which suits a firm that works in Indian cities. .com is the one everybody knows. None of them will make Google rank you higher on its own. What earns you a place in search results is what is on your pages, not the ending of the address.
So pick whichever ending gives you a short, clear name. If you can, buy the other common endings too, and point them to your main address so that anyone typing the wrong one still reaches you. Pointing, here, just means setting up the extra name to forward visitors to the real one. It also stops someone else from buying it.
Things to avoid
- Hyphens and numbers, which are hard to say aloud
- Words like "best", "top" or "no1", which look like spam
- Long strings of keywords, such as cheap-flats-for-sale-in-indore
- A single locality in the name, if you plan to grow beyond it
- Anything close to another firm's name, or to a builder's brand you sell for
- Spellings that differ from how you say the name
Keyword-stuffed domains were once thought to be a shortcut to ranking. Today they mostly make a business look less trustworthy, and they do little for you on Google. Build your ranking on your pages instead, starting with making sure you rank for your own business name.
Register it in your own name
This is the most important part of the whole article.
The domain must be registered with you, or your company, as the owner. Your email and phone number should be the contact details. You should have your own login to the registrar, which is simply the company you bought the domain from.
It is common for a developer or agency to buy the domain on a client's behalf, in their own account, to save time. That usually works fine until you want to change provider, or the developer stops answering calls. Then you discover that the address on all your cards belongs to someone else, and everything Google has learned about your site sits on an address you do not control. We cover this in more detail in who owns your leads and listings if you switch providers.
Two more habits are worth building now:
- Turn on automatic renewal. A domain that lapses can be bought by someone else.
- Keep the registrar login somewhere safe that does not depend on one employee's memory.
Use it for your email too
Once you own the domain, use it for email. An address like info@yourfirm.in on a hoarding looks more established than a Gmail address.
More importantly, it lets you set up your domain so that emails sent from your website, like enquiry alerts, are trusted by inbox providers. Without that setup, those alerts often end up in spam, and you never see the enquiry. We explain why in why enquiry emails land in spam.
What to do this week
- Shortlist three names and say each one aloud to a friend.
- Check which ones are available at a registrar.
- Buy your choice in your own name, with automatic renewal switched on.
- If you already have a domain, log in to the registrar and check whose name it is in and when it expires.
That last check takes five minutes, and it is worth doing even if you are perfectly happy with your current site. If you cannot find the login at all, that tells you something too, and it is far better to find out now than on the day you need it.
