HOW CRITICAL IS YOUR DOMAIN NAME
TO GAINING MARKET SHARE?

Creating and establishing the domain name or URL of your website is a critical piece of groundwork in laying the foundation for the online marketing strategy for your business. Your domain name should present information about the products or services you offer, and be easy for first-time visitors to remember and share with other prospective customers.

A domain name should be not only a selling point, but a differentiation point that sets you apart from less distinct competitors to make a lasting impression on users and search engine.

Ideally, your homepage's URL should incorporate keywords but not by blindly hyphenating a series of them; this makes it difficult for users to remember and gives it a spammily obvious appearance to search engines.

Today, we sit down with Lars Neubohn, president of The Wine Cellarage. Join us for a discussion and overview on the steps they took to develop their domain name URL so that it could inform their targeted audience, stick in their memories, and help boost their search engine rankings.

Neubohn's company offers a vast selection of rare and vintage wine for purchase online as well as a knowledgeable sales team that assists clients who wish to sell high-quality individual bottles and whole collections. The Wine Cellarage will also store its clients' prized bottles in highly conditioned, climate-controlled facilities.

"We buy wine, sell wine, and store wine," explains Neubohn, "It made sense that 'wine' would figure into our main keywords, and that it should be incorporated into the domain name."

This was a wise first step, as it garners the attention of the wine lovers that compose Neubohn's desired customers. 

"Yet, we realized there are a lot of other sites and businesses that deal with various elements of wine, and use a similar tactic with their domain name." Neubohn observes, "What kind of URL would explain our services and set us apart from other wine-related sites without being too wordy or hard for people to remember?"

This brings us to the next two steps after struggling to catch users' attention: informing them about what you do as well as why you are good or even the best at it.

Consider the knowledge and potential search terms of your targeted users, and you can find informative and relevant terms that make your site easy to find. It is best to stay away from anything too verbose or obscure, as users may make spelling mistakes, and to avoid hyphenating if possible as hyphens are easy to forget in verbal transmissions and when typing.

"Picking a name like 'buywine.com,' 'winesales.com,' or even 'winestorage.com' might have given them a vague idea of what we do, but would have made us sound generic, spammy, and sort of unrefined given the fact we handle $1,000 bottles of Chateau Lafite." Neubohn elaborates, "Someone who knows wine knows it is best contained in a cellar."

"Winecellarage" conveys information about what Neubohn does, displays professional knowledge to back up why he's good, and fulfills both these purposes with four easy syllables.

A domain name that supplies information about your business and its page can serve an additional function in your online marketing efforts: search engine optimization. The inventive implementation of a keyword in a URL is going to mean it will hold greater value to Google as it factors into search engine ranking criteria.

This tactic did not go unnoticed by Neubohn, who made certain the keyword "wine" factored into his domain name with a distinct, related term that makes his business a brand as well as a name and increases its chances of ranking higher on the first page.

The Wine Cellarage's keyword "NYC wine storage" is already ranked #4 on the first page of Google, and #1 on the first page of Bing for the same term. We'll drink to that.

 Let's revisit 4 ways a carefully selected domain name URL can help solidify your brand:

1.)   Gives users a summary of what you do and what your site is about.

2.)    Helps you stand out from similar competing sites.

3.)    Makes your site easier to locate and share with other prospective customers.

4.)    Increases your chances of higher search engine rankings.

Thanks for reading. Jason.
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