When domain names can loose you the Dragons

I sat down to watch Dragon’s Den on BBC2 last night as I do each week for a mixture of entertainment, inspiration and general bemusement at some people’s idea of what makes a great business.

My ears pricked up when two gentlemen from Ireland wanted investments for a online recipe video website combined with a social network arena with revenue generation through advertising.

All was going well for the duo and it seemed the Dragon’s were interested in this internet venture, until the bombshell was dropped. Their domain name was very similar to another website doing almost exactly the same thing and the only difference was their domain was in the plural rather than the singular. Even the .tv extension was the same.

I leapt out of my seat at this and exclaimed ‘the Dragon’s are out!’. And sure enough they all dropped out quicker than you can say ‘domain name’.

The Dragons know the importance of domain name ownership and how confusion amongst potential visitors can loose you important visitors on the web. Your domain name is absolutely crucial to the success or failure of your website when it comes to marketing. It’s true that for SEO there may not be such a major issue because your website may be better optimized and therefore rank more highly than a similar sounding name. But when it comes to getting your brand out there and marketing your website in you have to own all the versions of your brand domain name and be distinctive. A grape is distinctive from a banana but ’4grapes’ is very similar to ’4grape’.

How many times has someone told you the web address of a site you’re interested in, or you’ve seen it on an advert on a train or billboard, and you get home to tap it in only to have forgotten whether it’s a .com or .co.uk? Is it plural or singular, is a word or numeral substitute(4 instead of ‘for’). If you do a search on Google you still won’t be any the wiser as to which site is which if they sound so similar and the one that comes top gets your visit.

Our client British Insurance knows the importance of domain name ownership and brand protection and owns .com, .co.uk, and hyphenated versions of their domain names to ensure that virtually everybody can find their products online even when they haven’t typed in the exact web address they saw in, say a newspaper article.

So when choosing domain names for your brand, choose wisely and a bit of extra outlay to register as many versions of your brand name possible is money well spent to catch all of the potential visitors out there. That way you’ll avoid the possibility of people saying “was it areoff.co.uk or areoff.com?”.