First impressions count…in terms of marketing and in terms of stickability in the mind of your potential client. Domain names are the first impression your firm will get when people either Google your law firm, or when given the domain name by others. Make sure it is a good and lasting impression.
It will also help your law firm SEO ranking. while the exact match domain name has sort of dropped a bit in the influence of search engines, keywords in your domain name still have an positive affect.
Tips for creating an effective and catchy domain name
- Keep it short – 6 to 14 characters is ideal – most of the top sites are around 6 to 8.
- Easy to type and spell – ask a few people to spell your domain name as a test.
- Stick to letters – hyphens and numbers make it difficult for people to remember and spelling becomes a problem (Like Tech4Law – the “4” is a clever way to shorten the domain name, but to be honest “TechforLaw” may have been a better domain name for us.)
- Keywords in the beginning of the domain name – for the best results in SEO use the keyword in the beginning of the domain, but remember not to insert keywords that make the domain name awkward. If it does not sound natural, leave it out.
- Think long term – the domain will be around for a long time and if you do change it all your hard work on creating your powerful domain name will be lost and the SEO value will go down the toilet as well. In other words a domain like “Propertylaw.co.za” might be good for your firm now, but if you change to other avenues of law later, the domain will be useless to you.
- Verify that social media site names are available – you are most probably going to get to marketing on social media, so make sure the domain you are hoping to use is still available.
- Use of the correct domain name extension – in South Africa, the best domain name would be “.co.za” – if that is not available, use a “.com” address. If you have to have a domain name that is not available on these two, look at the new Top Level Domains like “.legal” or .”law” – but most South Africans will automatically think the domain will end in “.co.za”.
- Use the area if you can – that will help people identify where your firm is located.
- Don’t delay – the longer you wait, the less chance you will have of getting the domain name you want.
- Descriptive – when people read your domain name, they should be able to guess exactly what your law firm does.
- Create and choose a domain name with a group of people in the firm – then get all to create 3 top ideas and then put these together and vote on the best 3 then the best of those three again, but a day later, to allow people time to get used to the names.
- Beware of inappropriate words emerging from the domain name
- Check that the domain you have chosen is not blacklisted – use “site:” before the domain name, if it is blank is does not have a search history. Use Way Back Machine at https://archive.org/web/ to check the history of the domain.
- Your domain name does not have to be your firm name – a site like “ElginLawFirm.co.za” will mean more to Google and prospective clients than “SmitandAssociates.co.za”.
So there you have a couple of ideas to think about when creating your effective and catchy domain name for your firm.
