12 tips for choosing a great domain name for your healthcare business

I was leafing through The Art of SEO the other day (Enge, Spencer, Fishkin and Stricchiola, 2010) and I found this list on how to choose a domain name. Selecting a good domain name that will stand the test of time is an important aspect of internet marketing and will usually precede website design.  Below are great tips to consider when selecting a domain name for your healthcare business.

  1. Choose a .com TLD (top-level domain), unless you already own the .com and want to redirect to a co.uk, .org, .biz, and so on, possibly for marketing / branding / geographic reasons. Do this only if you own the .com and can redirect.
  2. Brainstorm five top keywords to create good domain ideas (keywords will bold in search results). One of our favourite examples of this is www.londonvisionclinic.com . This domain does an excellent job of keeping important keywords in the domain.
  3. Make the domain unique and unlike other, popular, domains. Do not choose a domain that can be confused with another domain (especially if the other domain is more popular).
  4. Make it easy to type – make it easy to spell, reduce length where possible, use memorable words.
  5. Make it easy to remember – this is especially true if you do a lot of broadcast advertising.
  6. Keep the name as short as possible, but avoid abbreviations unless the abbreviation is used as the name of your company.
  7. Create and fulfill expectations – what you see should be what you get; keep it intuitive to what is actually on the site.
  8. Avoid trademark infringement
  9. Set yourself apart with a brand – not just descriptive words. Yes, this in some ways contradicts point 2, but in this case, the domain is the name of the company.
  10. Reject hyphens and numbers
  11. Don’t follow the latest trends – avoid trendy misspellings, uninspiring short adjectives.
  12. Use an AJAX domain selection tool – e.g. https://ajaxwhois.com

Clearly, many of our readers will have domain names already. If you’re planning to change your domain name in the future, the above list will be useful.

Domain names and 301 redirects

If you are considering a domain name change, then you must be clear on the important SEO implications this may have. In this case, we’d advise the implementation of 301 redirects in order to keep the majority of your search volume intact. Google has provided their guidance on the use of 301 redirects and you’d be well advised to read it.

Just the other day I encountered a healthcare business who has been maintaining two websites with different domains, instead of redirecting the website from the old domain to the new. The problem here is that you are splitting your content between 2 domains, weakening both in terms of SEO value. It’s also a chore to maintain and involves costs that are unnecessary.

While Google doesn’t actively penalise websites that duplicate content, they may not index content that they have already indexed (they’re picky that way). So, it’s always best practice to have original content that can be indexed right the first time, and retire any old duplicate content that you don’t need.