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Your choice of domain name can significantly impact SEO rankings. Here’s a complete guide on how to choose an SEO-friendly domain.
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What’s in a domain name? When it comes to SEO, it might be more than you think.
Your domain name identifies your site and signals the kind of services you provide. The right domain name can make your website appear more trustworthy to human visitors, while a domain filled with quality content and links will appeal to search engine crawlers.
Domain SEO impacts almost everything about your website: how easy it is to rank for keywords, which topics your site is considered an authority on, and ultimately, how many people will browse your products. Understanding exactly how your domain name affects page rankings is therefore critical to the success of your brand.
Let’s explore the basics of domain SEO, starting with its definition.
Domain SEO is the practice of optimizing domains to make them more useful and accessible to human visitors and search engines. It involves picking a simple domain name, an optional subdomain, and a top-level domain (TLD) to create a clear web identity for your brand.
Domain SEO includes improving the technical health of your website by optimizing tags, site speed, and site map. It also involves content management to produce a relevant, high-quality portfolio of original content that’s helpful to visitors.
Another important aspect of domain SEO is acquiring backlinks from authoritative websites. When respected sites link to your content, search engines recognize your domain as a reliable source of information.
The more time you spend creating a streamlined, polished domain, the easier it will be to improve SEO for specific parts of your website.
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The length, included keywords, and extension of a domain name can be meaningful components of an SEO strategy. A focused and simple domain name indicates the purpose of a website to people and search engines.
Beware of choosing an overly promotional root domain name that may appear untrustworthy or scammy. www.cheap-discounted-jeans.net or freeshippingforlife.biz won’t inspire much confidence.
The wrong domain name can tarnish your brand reputation. Customers are aware of this, and so are search engines.
If you are creating a new domain, you can choose its name. SEO-friendly domain names are short, contain relevant keywords, and include simple terms.
Below are seven actionable tips for choosing a domain name that is optimized for search engines.
The importance of using keywords in a domain has varied over the years. It was once a mainstay of search indexing on sites like Google and used by hundreds of thousands of ecommerce brands throughout the early 2000s. Today, keywords continue to play a part in domain SEO, although their importance may have lessened.
Your domain doesn’t need to contain your target search phrase, but it should include a relevant concept to provide clarity around your brand. For example, fashion brand Sabo uses the domain name www.saboskirt.com—a simple name that identifies the brand and includes a keyword to describe the business’s flagship product.
Keep in mind that a great domain name doesn’t need to be wholly focused on keywords. Try to register a domain name with just one or two keywords, or encapsulate the idea of your brand with a short acronym.
The length of your domain name does not affect its standing on search engines. However, it can have a significant impact on its memorability for prospective customers.
Research indicates that the average domain length is 12 characters long, but the most popular websites tend to have even shorter names.
As well as being short, domains need to be readable. Domain names with clear meanings help to build trust, while those containing strings of numbers and letters can be a security concern for some users.
When researchers from UPenn compared domain names against their performance, they found that simple and straightforward names were the most efficient:
The takeaway? The simpler your domain name, the better it is likely to perform.
The .com TLD is the most trusted domain extension in the world, and it’s 33% more memorable than any other top level domain. While the use of .com won’t provide any SEO benefit by itself, it will prove your trustworthiness to customers.
Not all is lost if you don’t have a .com domain. Extensions such as .co, .us, and .net continue to gather audience trust. Here’s an official list of top-level domains by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).
Instead of investing in a .com TLD, you could choose a TLD extension that indicates to search engines what your site is about. For example, an online clothing retailer might opt for .boutique or .apparel—both tell crawlers and search traffic the context of your website before they click.
Other examples include:
Special characters can make your domain look unique, but they can harm your SEO efforts as well. Search engines can’t always understand special characters. They can also confuse people and worsen the user experience, potentially impacting your brand credibility. Best practice is to avoid special characters such as hyphens, digits, stars(*), or ampersands (&).
Where you buy your domain from matters. Your domain registrar is responsible for keeping your website accessible. Downtime, no auto-renewal notice, and lack of security features can cause your site to go down—in which case, search engine crawlers can’t access your website. This is important because search engines like Google prioritize sites that are reliable and offer a positive user experience.
If you’ve bought a website hosting package from the same registrar, your decision can also impact site speed—a known ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. Choose a registrar that offers distributed servers and integration with a content delivery network (CDN). You may need to upgrade to a dedicated server once traffic grows. If you buy your domain through Shopify, you can rest assured knowing that site speed and performance are priorities—from just starting out to serving millions of customers worldwide.
Understanding the elements that improve your domain’s SEO status will help you build a winning strategy.
The best way to improve your purchased domain name’s SEO is by focusing on creating valuable content and building backlinks from other well-regarded websites.
Content is one of the most valuable things you can publish on a domain. Highly researched and informative content is an excellent method of increasing your authority in the marketplace, and it will help increase your search traffic.
Start by creating SEO-friendly landing pages and blog posts. Be sure to add value to every piece of writing you produce, and never rely on plagiarism or black-hat techniques to speed up your content production.
Other examples of content you could publish on your domains include:
Not only will this content provide evergreen SEO value to your domain, but it also has the potential to generate organic backlinks as well.
Backlinks are third-party hyperlinks that direct traffic from other websites to your domain. They are important for two reasons:
Analysis shows a strong backlink profile is almost always required to rank in competitive search results.
The best way to source backlinks for your domain is to become an authority in your niche. Creating actionable content and well-written copy is an efficient way to do this. You can also reach out to other brands or websites that may be interested in partnering with you or creating roundups or affiliate content to garner interest.
Note that bulk backlinks from a single website are frowned upon by Google’s search algorithm. It’s best to rely on organic links as much as possible—not black-hat or paid strategies.
Your domain name isn’t just text on a screen—it gives visitors an inside look at who you are and what you do. Domain SEO may include user signals, meaning that the more positively your domain presents to visitors, the better it will do.
Use your domain name to give users a taste of your brand, including its voice and tone.
There are a number of great examples of domain name branding, including:
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Learning by example is a great way to approach domain name SEO. Whether you already have some inspiration or are looking for domain name suggestions, these popular domain examples are perfect examples of strategy, length, and branding.
Just two syllables long, Gymshark is a word that rolls off the tongue. This short domain name is also separated into multiple subdomains to help with global traffic. This is a great international SEO tactic for brands with a multinational presence.
This domain is memorable, specific, and easy to remember. No hyphens, numbers, or other strange spellings are included—just the brand’s name—which helps visitors return to the site without much trouble.
Staud also uses a TLD extension to describe what the website is about, helping both visitors and search engines contextualize the site.
Verve Coffee Roasters has a simple domain name that’s easy to remember. It’s also optimized for SEO, containing the brand’s name and a brief description of what it sells: coffee.
Before you purchase an SEO-friendly domain name, you may want to research the domains used by your largest competitors. Competitor analysis allows you to better understand your rival domains’ position, ranking, and perception in the marketplace. The analysis can be used to help inform your decisions before making a domain name purchase.
To perform a basic competitor domain name SEO analysis, ask yourself:
The more information you glean from your competitors’ domain SEO, the better decisions you can make about the domain name you choose to purchase.
Domain names do impact your SEO efforts, but they aren’t necessarily a make-or-break portion of your strategy.
In fact, changing a domain name could confuse search engines and other bots trying to crawl through your web pages. A new domain name might also make it difficult for returning visitors to find your site, tanking your web traffic.
You should only consider changing your domain name for SEO if:
Remember that your domain name isn’t necessarily one of the ranking factors for search engines. Domain age may not matter either. However, changing your domain name or rebranding it without following best practices could confuse visitors and search engines alike.
Finding a domain that follows all best SEO practices can take time—building one yourself takes even longer. Try these tools to help you evaluate your options before registering a domain.
Domain names are online digital identities that speak volumes about who you are, what you do, and what visitors should expect from you. While the name you choose will not necessarily affect search engine rankings, it’s a good idea to pick short, memorable, and highly relevant phrases that put you in the running with today’s major brands.
With some dedicated effort and a little planning, you can choose an SEO-friendly domain name that continues to reap the benefits long after registration.
Domains have a large impact on SEO. The number of links pointing to a domain from high-authority websites will significantly impact the ability of that domain’s web pages to rank in search engines. The cohesiveness and relevance of a domain’s content will also impact its search engine rankings for a particular topic area.
While .com domains are familiar and trusted by visitors, the .com extension doesn’t directly affect search engine rankings.
There are various free tools you can use to check your site’s domain authority:
According to Statista, almost half of all websites use the .com domain extension. After .com, the most common extensions are .org, .ru, .de, and .net. Domains with .com denote commercial use, while .org usually sets expectations for nonprofits or charities.
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