Your Mediation Domain Name: Strategies for Naming a Website

Your domain name is like an online business calling card. It says something about who you are, what you do, or how you can help. Preferably, it conveys professionalism, credibility, and stability, which are particularly important for helping the relatively young ADR field create public trust and interest.

In this third article in a short series on naming domains , I offer some considerations in choosing the right domain name for your mediation practice.

Your business brand and your domain name should be the same. I say “business brand” instead of business name because your business may have several brands. For instance, my formal business name is Lenski Strategic LLC, under the umbrella of which Mediator Tech exists. I made the decision to create a new brand (Mediator Tech) and domain (www.mediatortech.com) for this portion of my work because it makes good business sense to do so.

Choose your business/brand name and domain name at the same time. This, of course, only makes sense if you’re newly in business and still forming your business presence online and off. If you’re experimenting with possible business names, be sure to find out if the domain is available before making a final decision. I recommend PowWeb and GoDaddy to check out the availability of domain names.

What if your business name or brand is already taken? If you’ve already established a business presence you don’t want to change but don’t yet have a well-developed online presence for your business, there are several ways to work around a domain name already owned by someone else:

• Choose an alternate extension. Though .com is the prevalent choice, there may be other viable options, including .info, .biz, .org or your country extension (e.g., .uk). The web is full of competing opinions about whether or not these alternates are good business sense or not, so do what feels right to you.
• Add hyphens. As with alternate extensions, there are strong opinions both for and against hyphenated domain names. Some suggest that names like www.your-business-name.com work better in search engines and make the name more memorable because the separate words stand out. Others say it looks contrived, signals “late-comer,” and is annoying to type.
• Offer to buy the domain name from the other owner. I don’t know how realistic this is but if none of the other options are acceptable, it may be worth seeing if the current domain owner might sell. You can find the owner of a domain name by visiting Network Solutions WHOIS Search or Internic.

A few other recommendations to keep in mind. Your domain name can be up to 67 characters long (or 63 characters before the “.com”). That’s a whole lot of letters. To use those letters well, consider:

• Choose a name that’s brief enough to be easily memorable but with enough substance to say something. While there’s also competing wisdom out there about domain name length, many marketing professionals seem to be suggesting that shorter is better as long as it’s got substance as to who you are or what benefit you offer.
• Browsers recognize upper- and lower-case letters equally. So, if you’ve got a long-ish domain name to put on your business card, consider printing “YourBusinessAndBrandName.com” instead of “yourbusinessandbrandname.com.”
• It’s so inexpensive to buy un-owned domain names that there’s nothing to prevent you from buying multiple domains to protect your business name. So, if you’re primary domain name is ResolvingBusinessDisputes.com, you may also want to register ResolvingBizDisputes.com and ResolveBusinessDisputes.com. There’s even a way for your extra domains to send people to your primary domain and I’ll cover that in the next post.

The first post in this short series was Naming Your Domain: Make It Easier for Clients to Find You Online. The next post is Choosing an ADR Domain Name: Fixing Naming Mistakes.

Tags: adr websites, marketing mediation, online marketing, mediation