When advertising plastic surgery practices on the Internet, having a good domain name can be very important. In fact, too many people underestimate the value of a good domain name. So, just what makes a domain name a good one and why are they so important?
Domain names are important for reasons that you’d probably be surprised to learn. A good name isn’t as important in helping people find your site for the first time. Instead, the real value of a good name is that it helps people find your site on subsequent visits.
Many, if not most, visitors to your site will find you by clicking on a link to your site from another site, whether through search engine results, banners or a simple link. Ideally, those who like your site will bookmark it. Unfortunately, many people fail to do this. For those who don’t bookmark your site, finding it again can be difficult. They usually have to go through the same process they used to find your site the first time, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to find it. As such, a good domain name, one that’s easy to remember, can be very valuable.
This can prove particularly important when advertising plastic surgery practices on the Internet. Many potential patients will search the Internet for information about procedures. They may conduct many searches and visit many sites before actually making a decision to move forward. By that time, your site’s professional design and valuable content should have convinced visitors to return to your site, but they must be able to get back to your site, hence the good, easy to remember domain name.
Consider the following example: Pretend your practice is known as The Plastic Surgery Center. The domain names www.plasticsurgerycenter.com and www.theplasticsurgerycenter.com would be perfect, right? Though they very well may be perfect, they’re most likely already taken. In fact, choosing a domain name can prove extremely frustrating given that most of the good ones are already taken and you can spend hours trying to find one that’s right for your business. So maybe you try psc.com next and, like most three-letter combinations, you find that to be taken as well. So you get to a point where you’re happy to grab any name that even remotely works with your practice’s name and, low and behold, www.psc-inc.com is available so you register for it. Unfortunately, the domain name you just registered for is far from a good one and, in fact, it’s actually pretty bad.
Remember the following rules when choosing your domain name:
- Avoid cryptic names. Don’t make your domain name a cryptic one. Unless The Plastic Surgery Center is actually known as PSC, don’t abbreviate it. Only abbreviate a name when it’s the company’s trademark, like IBM. It’s best to make your domain name the same as the company name that people know as it gives them a far better chance of at least correctly guessing your website address. You can even take a poll and ask friends and staff members what they would expect your domain name to be. Also consider how your domain name would sound when spoken over the phone to customers and avoid the need to explain spellings, special characters and the like.
- Don’t use dashes. Dashes may eventually become more common in domain names as good domain names become harder to come by. For now, however, they’re simply confusing to most Internet users and are best avoided.
- Consider registering multiple domains. It can be very handy, and more than worth the extra expense, to register for more than one domain name. If there are several obvious possibilities for your domain name, register for them. This increases the chance of people guessing your domain right and actually finding you. This is also important for domains that can be easily misspelled or otherwise misconstrued. In the example using The Plastic Surgery Center, it would be best to register for both www.theplasticsurgerycenter.com and www.plasticsurgerycenter.com.
- Support your domain name. Once you’ve chosen your domain name, support and reinforce it by incorporating it into your website’s logo and including it on all company material like business cards, invoices, stationary, and the like.