Hi, Marshall and Gary here

All sorts of interesting bits and pieces exercise our minds here at Small Business Internet Marketing. It is said that inspiration comes from the strangest places. Well, talking about online marketing and internet marketing strategies is no different.

As I was driving my son to school this morning, I saw a learner driver in front of me. The company name on the car was something like AABEC Driving Company. I jokingly said to my son “I wonder if it is still the first driver teaching company in the phone book?” He, like all 16 year old boys, looked at me as if I was some kind of demented fool.

So I had explain the strategy of choosing a business name that was one of the first in the telephone directory (white pages) or was the first listing for the business type (yellow pages). You get it – the most “A’s” and “B’s” at the front of your business name, and bingo – you are first on the alphabetic list. It is one of the original “get your name to the top of the search pile” marketing strategies in the old world.

Well, after dropping him at school I had to drive down to the coast to see a client. What should I see on the highway but a dump truck emblazoned with Aardvark Earthmoving. Another classic case of “first in the search list”.

This co-incidence got us thinking at Small Business Internet Marketing. Both these companies obviously looked at what was in the phone book before choosing their business name. There was no connection between the business owner and the name (apologies to Mr Aardvark should we be wrong). So anything starting with lots of “a’s” got more traffic and inquiries.

Well, the internet now offers the same opportunity. However, it is no longer driven by such a narrow concept as how many “a’s” but by who is using the right words and phrases, and who has best optimised their website. But the logic is the same. Work out the best business name by working out what is the best name to get to the top of the pile.

So in internet marketing, this means a high ranking in a search engine. The jury is never 100% certain on what the Google algorithm gives a positive tick to and not, but there is enough evidence to suggest when you have the opportunity to align a URL root name with your major keyword, that you should.

So if you want to set up a driving lesson business in Brisbane, the keyword “driving lessons Brisbane” gets 390 exact searches a month in Australia. The domain name www.driving-lesson-brisbane.com.au is available to register. “Driving schools Brisbane” gets 480 exact searches a month and you can register this as a hyphenated domain name. Why would you go with the ego and register www.marshallsdrivingschool.com.au when far better optimised domain names are available?

A couple of other things to note:

• Google views a hyphen as a divider in a URL (so it is “reading” driving lessons Brisbane)

• An optimised domain name is the start, not the finish – all other good off and on page SEO still has to be done

• From a searcher viewpoint, seeing a URL that exactly matches what they entered in as a search query will give your site a psychological advantage over a site which is the same service but the URL is less descriptive (www.marshalldrivingschool.com.au for example – is it local or national, who is Marshall, is he any good, I haven’t heard of him, etc)

• Getting traffic is great, but your website still has to convert surfers to an action

• We are not suggesting that you abandon a good ranking site domain name just to aim for a few places higher

Hope this helps clear your thinking on the choice of a domain name for your internet marketing strategies.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary