Branding With Your URL
Good branding should be a top to bottom effort. From designing a website to planning your unique selling proposition, branding encompasses an entire strategy beyond just a pretty logo. An often overlooked component of branding is deciding what your site’s or blog’s URL address should be. This is a branding are that shouldn’t be taken lightly and we’ll explain why below.
Create a URL name that reflects what your business does or if you’re creating a blog, who the person is behind the blog. For instance, if you have a business that provides shoes for older women then you’d want to create a URL that reflect this, like shoesforseniorwomen.com. Same thing goes for developing a blog URL. The person behind the blog should use their name as the URL address, like LeiliMcKinley.com.
There are two schools of thought on URL branding. The first believes that you should use your company name in the URL since there are some folks who will search by the business name. This makes sense for larger, more established brands like Nike, Starbucks or McDonalds. It wouldn’t make sense for them to create a URL that says sportshoes,com, coffeestores.com or cheeseburgerandfries.com.
For smaller brands, which applies to most everyone else, the second approach to crafting a URL would be to write one that shows of what your business does through keywords. Using the larger brand examples from above, sportshoes.com would be an excellent way to appeal to large groups of people who are searching specifically for that item. Make sense?
Now that you have a basic understanding of what a branded URL is here are some other things to consider:
Hyphenated names. The pro is that search engine easily identify each keyword and will normally return better search results for people seeking what you offer. The con is that hyphenated URLs are easy to forget when people are sharing or recommending them.
Articles and plurals. If you’ve decided on a specific branded URL like childrensauthor.com, but discover it’s taken, you could add ‘the’ to the URL (thechildrensauthor.com). Downside is that unless people aware of the addition, you’ll lose traffic to your competitor. This is the same thing for plural URLs like, cat.com versus cats.com.
Choose carefully and spend some time planning. Try searching for something on the web and look at how the URLs have been set-up.
Personally, I believe it is imperative that a website have the organizations name in some format or another. Keyword style URLs are great, but they should be purchased as secondary domain names that are used as additional fingers pointing to your website.