How Long Should a Domain Name Be?

By Adam  |  3 Nov 2015 10:00:00

In the various blog posts which tell you how to use different domains with Sellr, I gave some general advice about choosing a domain name. In case you've not read any of them, I'll summarise what I said there now: for SEO purposes, I advised including a key word that is related to your business because then, when people search for that keyword by itself, your website might just come up in their Google searches even if they aren't at all familiar with you yet. So, if your business was called Wickedsick and you sold yo-yos, then a good domain name might be www.WickedsickYo-Yos.com. But do keep in mind that there are no right or wrong choices; keeping things shorter does also have its strengths.

If you've got a nice and simple business name (like Flam, for example) and you sell biotechnological engineering software, then www.Flam.com is going to be much more easy for customers to remember than www.FlamBiotechnologicalEngineeringSoftware.com; people might forget the whole URL and, even if they remember, they might make a typo somewhere, quickly become frustrated and give up on searching for your website. You also need to consider that if you have multiple words in your domain name, there's a chance that people will not be able to read them because domains are not capitalised. You might also wish to just initialise your business name in your domain; if your business is called The Quintessential Victorian Anti-Establishment and Anti-Authoritarian Memorabilia Collection, then you might just want to go for www.QVAAMC.com because it's much easier to write in and much easier to remember. Abnormally long domain names can also sometimes be bad for SEO because if the essential keyword is twenty characters into the URL then it will have little effect on people's searches.

So keep these things in mind as you are choosing your domain name. Going for something short could be just the right choice and going for something just a little longer might also be just the right choice; it depends on you, your business and your product. Whatever you ultimately decide to do, I hope that choosing to buy a name will be a good choice for you and your business and that your eCommerce website will find many customers. But if you don't even have an eCommerce website yet, then why not sign up to Sellr now? For no cost at all, you can turn your eCommerce dream into an eCommerce reality.