There are two ways to name a site. One uses the words people search for, like a plain description of the service. The other uses a distinctive brand that means nothing until you give it meaning.
Both work, and plenty of successful businesses sit at each end. The choice matters because a domain is hard to change later: every link, business card, mailbox and search ranking you build points at it. Pick with some care, and pick for the business you want in five years rather than the one you have this month.
Descriptive names: easy to read, hard to own
A descriptive name tells a stranger what you do before they have clicked anything. A name made of the words for your trade and your town is understood at once, and it is easy to dictate over the phone.
The weakness is that anyone can use the same words. If the obvious phrase is taken, you end up with a hyphen, a number or an awkward ending, all of which are worse than a different idea. You can seldom trademark a name that merely describes the goods, because trademark offices generally refuse to give one trader exclusive rights to ordinary words for what they sell. That leaves you with little protection when a competitor registers something nearly identical.
Descriptive names also box you in. A name built around one product or one town becomes a nuisance the day you add a second.
Brand names: harder to launch, easier to protect
A brand name is a made-up word, an unrelated real word or a surname. On day one it says nothing about your business, so you pay for that in explanation, advertising and patience. After that it works in your favour. Search results for a rare word show you rather than a crowd, and a distinctive name is far easier to register as a trademark.
It also travels. A brand has no opinion about shoes or software, so it still fits when you move from one to the other next year.
The hybrid usually wins
A hybrid is a distinctive word with a hint of the subject: something that sounds like what you do without being a plain description of it. It gives a stranger a clue and gives you something you can defend. This is where most small businesses do best, and it is the safest default if you cannot decide.
Watch for hybrids that lean too hard on a generic word. If the distinctive part is thin, you are back to a descriptive name wearing a hat.
A worked example
Take a two-person bakery in a small town. The descriptive route gives something like the town name plus "bakers", which is clear and taken by a larger firm two counties away. The coined route gives a made-up word that needs a sign and a year of explaining. The hybrid route might pair a baking word with a short, unusual one, and the result can be said down a phone line, found in search and registered as a mark without a fight.
The bakery then adds a second shop, begins selling online and, in time, supplies cafes. The town name stops being accurate; the hybrid carries on being fine. That is the real argument for choosing the name you will want later.
Tests worth running before you pay
- Say it aloud to someone who has not seen it written. Can they spell it afterwards without asking?
- Say it in one breath. Long names get abbreviated by customers, and you do not control the abbreviation.
- Read it with the ending attached and with no spaces. Run-together words sometimes form something unfortunate; check the joins.
- Search for the name in quotes. If a similar business appears on the first page, customers will confuse you with it.
- Search the trademark register for your country in the classes you operate in. Do this before printing anything.
Last, make sure nobody could reasonably mix it up with a competitor. A name one letter away from a larger business is an invitation to a legal letter.
Common questions
Does a keyword in the domain help me rank?
Not in any way worth planning around. Search engines judge pages by content, links and how people use them. A keyword name can make your site look relevant to a human glancing at a result, which is a modest benefit, but a brand with good pages beats a keyword name with thin ones.
Can I start descriptive and rebrand later?
You can, but you pay for it in redirects, reprinted material and lost recognition. Set up 301 redirects with the redirect generator and expect rankings to wobble for a while.
Are hyphens acceptable?
They work, but they are hard to say aloud and easy to leave out. Treat a hyphen as a sign that the plain version is taken by someone else, and ask whether that someone will receive your customers' typos.