Now we are in such a connected world, our company and product name can be confused with anybody else in the world! – The means we have to be even more careful in when we chose domain names and product names.
Domain Names
There are more alternatives than yourname.com and yourname.co.uk, or even yourname.net This is because there are so many domain names being registered, the authority in charge soon realised there many companies around the world has the same name.
If did not matter to their local customers. The ‘Coffee Shop’, ‘Happy Fryer’ and other such names work well. However, these are the sort of business names that will be duplicated all over the world.
Is it really a problem?
Often it will not be, however, once you have thought of a name, you should use the same tool that is helping you to create the domain name, to check on what .com or .net or .anything versions of your domain name are taken.
You MUST use this tool to see and NOT google (yet). Many names are claimed and registered but not in use. That does not mean they will not be used in the future. So, it pays to be aware of what it claimed.
We wanted to start a new website and thought of ‘ExpertsWhoPodcast’ we were really happy to find that nobody had registerred any domain name like that, so we grabbed the .com domain!
Once you are happy the domain looks good, it is time to check out on Google.
Obviously, if a domain name is registered, but has no website connected to it yet, then there will be nothing for Google to search. Hence why we checked the name first. (See above). When you search in Google, separate any names within your domain name as individual words. This is the way most people are going to search for you when you give your name, so the results you will get from google are going to be for all those words
How Google Searches
- Google will tend to give priority to the name in the order they are given.
- Google will also be including searches where one of those words could just be the keyword for a page.
- Google will include pages of sites they may not have all the words
- Google may find sites where it uses a synonym for the words and not the actual words
Google will return results, that’s what it is for, and this is not the problem.
What we are looking for is a company with a similar name, doing a similar thing to you, who could be confused with yours.
If you find a name conflict, then it is up to your to decide if this is a problem for you, or the other compitor.
Do you want another company being confused and taking trade from you?
What will the other company think, could it even take action thinking you are taking business from it?
We are not finished, sorry.
Now you have the domain name that you are happy with you may want to use, or use in the future, social media.
Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, all have business pages that you can register on their site. It is a good idea to check on all of these for any name conflicts and even set up basic pages on these sites to ‘grab’ a name that you particularly want.
I have had companies offer me several hundred dollars for a facebook page I started.
URL – In the case of Facebook, Twitter, and youtube, you are creating your page URL, often called the vanity URL.
https://Facebook.com/Wpbusinessclub
https://Twitter.com/wpbusinessclub
https://www.youtube.com/user/WPBusinessClub
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