For SEO, How Important Is Your Domain Name?

Back when people used to consult the phone book when finding new businesses and services, some companies opted for names that would make them more visible. For instance, there are companies with names like “Aardvark Construction.” The sole reason for this is that “aardvark” will almost always come first in an alphabetical list of names. If someone flipped to the business directory and started looking at lists of construction companies, that company could count on being first. Something like “Zimmerman Construction” may have made more logical sense, but it also would tend to rank last.

But do things like this still matter in the age of SEO? Do you need to pick a company name and a domain name that works with your SEO efforts so that you can rank higher?

Exact-Match Names Are an Outdated Trend

This has been a hot topic in the past. Many companies found that they could instantly rank if they essentially used keywords as domain names. People would search these natural keyword strings and that site would come up first since the search engine assumed the person was trying to access it. For instance, instead of Peterson Office Furniture, a company might be named Low Cost Office Furniture or Best Value Office Furniture. This would give them a domain name like lowcostofficefurniture.com, and they’d rank highly for those on a budget looking for office supplies.

However, Google quickly realized that this could pose some problems. The engine was just reacting to the domain name, not the actual relevance of the results. A site could be virtually useless to the user and still rank highly because it had the right name. As such, they did away with high rankings for exact-match domain names, so using them can now hinder your efforts rather than help.

This doesn’t mean you can’t use keywords in your domain name or that you shouldn’t consider SEO when naming your company. It can still help. But it’s not the simple way to the top of the search results that it used to be. There’s a lot more than that to modern SEO, and using these outdated tactics can force you to rank lower than you would otherwise.

Keeping up with SEO

SEO is always changing. For it to be effective, you have to keep up with these changes and address them regularly. You also need to avoid crucial mistakes. We can help with all of this at Content Customs, so we hope you will get in touch with us today.