The Importance of a Good Domain Name for Your Startup and SEO

There is much information for start-up businesses available on the internet, but one thing I have noticed is there is room for an apparent breakdown of what is required – Domain name and SEO.

Here are three reasons I have confidence in the basic advice I am going to give you to start on the right path:

The difference between organic leads and social media leads is vast. Organic SEO is the Holy Grail of the search engine ranking world; your ROI will come over time. Of course, you will get leads from a paid marketing campaign while it is in progress or until funds dry up.  However, if you follow clearly defined strategies for your SEO campaign, you will generate organic quality leads, (as mentioned above is far superior in quality) traffic and brand recognition for the foreseeable future.

Getting it right at the start is the hardest but most crucial factor to long-term success. If you feel you do not have the know-how or the time to be effective with generic SEO then search for an SEO company or SEO agency (add your area) to hire a professional and put it under your marketing budget as it’s very important for the future of your business. If you do look for a firm or individual it goes without saying they should be top of the search engine for the keyword search that you conduct, if they can get themselves to position one with their kind of competition there’s a very good chance, they can get you there too.

Recommended for you: Top 5 Local SEO Strategies to Increase Your Traffic.

Good Domain Name & SEO – a brief to make the right start with your startup

You Literal Calling Card – The Domain Name

Your Domain will appear on all your marketing tools, digital or other. It’s the core of everything that you are. It’s tied to the brand and under no circumstances do you want to be re-branding your name shortly, or, ever.

So it is critical to get this right from day one. Here are some basic tips to think about when deciding on the Domain:

KISS: Keep it short and simple. Make it rememberable and as short as possible so it’s easier to type and remember so they will even type it directly into the address bar. Single words give you authority but with this will come at a cost. In today’s online world many of these names have been bought and are sold on at higher prices.

Blended words (Portmanteau) can be good; a well-known example would be Investopedia.

Try to avoid numbers and hyphens in your domain unless you are sure of what you are doing and have a reason to do so.

Advice: Make sure you check that Google does not blacklist the name that you have chosen. %LINK1%. Be sure to go to Wayback Machine or Archive.com to look through trademarks and any previous usage. Focus purely on the usability of the name, as an example, currently trending for tech-based start-ups is “.io”.

So you have no boundaries with it, the sky’s the limit. But remember to keep your target audience in mind, try to put yourself in their shoes. Familiarity gets you UX points with the search bot, so a .com is favorable for familiarity.

Once you have decided what you are going to use, many companies are online whom you can choose to register with an undoubtedly you will decide on one that is on the first page of Google (a subject we will cover in a moment); companies such as GoDaddy or NameCheap will appear, and you can pay for it using a credit or debit card or PayPal.

Once you have purchased and registered the domain it’s on next to website design for the business. A suggestion for you of what is most optimizable; go for WordPress especially if you don’t want to get bogged down with code.

You may like: 5 Ways to Increase Domain Authority (DA) of Your Website.

SEO

Your Heavyweight Marketing tool

SEO although a very competitive business is free. If you follow the rules and implement enough hard work, it will pay off.  If you ensure to have detailed and engaging content and write regular posts that rank high for a search query, then you get looked at as a reliable author and ranked accordingly.

Important

Remember if you don’t have the time to do in-house SEO then search under the following terms for and look to hire the services of an SEO Company, SEO Agency or SEO Agencies near me.  For example, I would search for SEO in Canberra as that’s my hometown. It will go under your marketing budget. But believe me, it’s worth every $ you spend if you genuinely do not have the time to devote to it.

‘Thought-leadership’ points are what you are looking for with the search engines; these are obtained organically. People trust the algorithm to sort out good and popular from sub-standard.  It is a lot easier than people think, but there’s a lot more to it than just writing good content.

SEO can be divided into two categories:

To be able to implement a strategy you must first have a working understanding of the differences between the two and how they work individually.

On Page SEO

This is user optimization for your Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s).  It will include everything from content and keywords to image optimization, responsive design, the load-up speed with internal and external links and more.

Tips and tools to remember:

Having a keyword finder tool is mandatory.  The best ones are Ahrefs, Moz or SEMrush to name a few.  Look for all the keywords with good search volumes that are related to you plus with the right package look at the difficulty, if it’s high or low then once you are ready, think about creating content around it.

Remember: Don’t focus on heavy, dense content, the system has evolved, keyword stuffing does not work,  make sure your content reads naturally ‘organically’ within the title, heading and a few times in the content.

Outbound links

When the site you’re linking to has a high DA itself, your domain authority (DA) will likely get a boost. It reads that you are concentrating on providing value to your audience.

Internal Linking and your Content Pages.

Once you have managed to get a high-ranking post on your site you can add that link to a newer post and the newer post will piggyback off that original post, you can do this as many times as seems reasonable.

Off-Page SEO

Linking with reputable sources in your industry/niche, guest posting on high-ranking blogs and sites, networking and reaching out for opportunities.

You may also like: 7 Important SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid in 2019.

Conclusion

If you decide to outreach and throw yourself into guest posting, the goal is to get on as many high ranking DA sites as possible.  Look for do-follow links as these are readable by the search engines. Also even if the site is not sending traffic directly to you, its gathering points on your Domain authority. The Guest Posting starts as just building backlinks, but later on, you can use these to build brand authority.

This article is written by Paula Timpson. She is an avid tech blogger with a love of all sports and cookery which she also writes about. Tech is her main interest and she is associated with SEOCompanyCanberra.com.au, an SEO company in Australia.

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