Catchy Business Names In The Internet Age
You can find plenty of suggestions on the Internet for ways to come up with a list of catchy business names. Random name generators work well, and they’re free and easy to find online. I’d strongly suggest looking at the Names & Brands – business name generator. Brainstorming is fun, though gathering your ideas for catchy names and brands can become a time-sink, and if you’re not careful it can be a distraction to actually developing your business! Obviously you need a name that is unique and memorable, and you’ll get only one chance to choose it. But there is another consideration as to business names, one that has arisen in the last 10 years or so, and I would contend that it outweighs almost any other definition of what a “good” business name is.
Ask yourself how, as we move forward, your business will be found. It will not be through the Yellow Pages. As people consume a variety of media today, traditional television, newspaper and radio advertising becomes less relevant. We actively search for information we need nowadays. What did you do when you were looking for ways to find a business name, just now?
You went to a search engine. From there, sooner or later, you clicked through to this site. This is the way that we will find most of our information in the future. For speed and efficiency, nothing else approaches this simple act of typing in a short description of what we are looking for. Business owners will naturally have to have advertising budgets to overtly target potential customers in places in which these customers might look as well. However, when you are choosing your business name and deciding on a brand into which you will pour countless hours, you cannot ignore the potential it has — I’m talking about the domain name itself — for helping you acquire customers within this new dynamic of internet search.
When dreaming up catchy business name ideas you can help customers and potential customers find you via the search engines by choosing a name that is available as a domain name, as a URL. The fact is that for a given subject or keyword, search engines give more credit/place more weight on sites whose domain name contains the keyword that was searched for to begin with. Put differently: a site, or even a page on a site, is considered to have more authority for a term, all else being equal, if it’s title contains the term. There are dozens of other factors as to page or site importance, but the title is probably the biggest single factor. Search engine robots don’t understand “catchy” (at least not yet!), but they can certainly match a search term with a domain name.
When you are choosing your business name, include words that describe your business right in the domain name of the website that will represent your business online. This will help search engines, and in turn your customers, find you. It is absolutely not some sneaky workaround devised to game the search engines. On the contrary, it is the best way to help the search engines connect your customers with you. Once connected, you do what you do best: making your brand memorable.
So does this mean that a creative, catchy name is not important for your business, or that you cannot use something memorable in your business name and your URL? Chances are that a short URL containing a couple of words to describe your business is already taken anyway, so you’ll need an additional term or two to arrive at a domain name that is actually available. While a domain that contains the exact search that people will perform to find you is very desirable, the fact is that there will be an endless variety of terms that people type into search engines that lead them to you anyway. This enables you to combine descriptive terms that are very relevant to your business with a little something extra that distinguishes you from your competitors.
For instance, the domain organicvegetables.com is certainly taken, but maybe you could name your organic vegetable farm organicvegetablelovers.com, a domain name which has a better chance of being available for you to buy, contains terms very relevant to your business, and is also memorable and descriptive, catchy even. With it, you establish yourself in the search engines as a website that is strongly related to organic vegetables by virtue of the first two words in your title, then use the third word, a positive, descriptive and friendly term to personalize your name. A functional and aesthetically pleasing brand is born.
The proper way to look at high placement in search engine results pages is as advertising, because for your commercial endeavors that’s exactly what it is. If the most important single thing you can do to place well in the non-paid portion of search results is also free, you can see the critical importance of choosing your domain name wisely. There is no reason why catchy business names cannot be combined with terms relevant to your business, right in the title. More than ever before, it is imperative that a business owner looks at his business name and brand in this way.
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