How to find the Domain Name for your new Business?

Once upon a time you were able to buy a quality .com domain name without having to spend hours of research and brainstorming. That time has come and gone however, as these days all good .com domains have been bought, and there are people now speculating in buying old expiring domains for their good names, their SEO ranks and existing backlinks.

This means that professionals have created bots and programs that automatically scan all domains and add them to their list of domains to buy once they expire. This is why many people have such a hard time getting a good domain name, and often times when you visit the site you wanted to buy nobody is using it, it is just sitting there, waiting to be sold for a much larger price than it is worth.

Sometimes buying a .org or .net domain can be okay, but if your first choice of names are also taken on these top level domains, then I advise you to find a .com TLD as they are the most recognizable. So how do you find a good business name with an available .com domain also?

Luckily, there’s few good options out there, allowing us to find good names that are not already taken. This list only contains free tools, as everyone can check them out and try for themselves this way. If you were looking for a good name for a tech blog, I was able to find a decent name in 5 minutes such as techveranda.com. And if you are looking for a good name for a mobile app developer website, I also found mobile-app-developers.net for an example. But before we go into the different tools available, let’s find out how to identify a good domain.

So what makes a good Domain Name?

No keyword stuffing

It is important not to keywords tuff your names too much. This is not an exact science, but looking at the example from before, I personally think that mobile-app-developers.net is on the edge of being acceptable as a main name. A common rule of thumb is using hyphens in a domain name is a bad idea. In this example, I have used 2 hyphens, but it looks okay since there are only 3 words in the name.

Use a maximum 3-4 words

Just like it is important not to fill keywords in the domain name, so is it important not to add word after word. Look at this domain name: houstongardenandlandscapingcontractors.com – not very pretty is it? Some people have read an old SEO blog post, probably from before 2010, and thought it would be good to have a lot of words so the search engines would like the site. But honestly, in 2017 and forwards, it is more important what people think than what the robots think.

Remember to check the history

One final thing is that some domain names have been used before by other people, and sometimes they have been used for spam, or have shown bad content, and therefore could have a penalty from Google and therefore the domain could very well be absolutely useless since it would never show up in search results. Using archive.org you can see if the domain was used before, and sometimes you can even see what content was on the site. So remember to check every domain name before you purchase it, as it could be worth nothing at all.

List of best Domain Name Generators

1. Lean Domain Search

One of the oldest and most exhaustive tools out there, this tool has a large list of 5000 suffixes and prefixes available to search for. LDS only finds .com domains, but also checks if Twitter and Facebook profiles with the same name are in use.

2. NameMesh

This is another great generator, and it can check all the common domains, such as org, net but also more recent ones such as .io and .co just to mention a few. Type in a few keywords and watch the magic happen, Namemesh also suggests SEO domains similar to your query and other extensions and prefixes you might not have thought of.

3. Dot-O-Mator

If you already know what sort of domain name you are looking for, you can use Dot-O-Mator to add prefixes or suffixes to your keyword, and watch all .com domains for your search. There’s a list of ~200 premade endings and beginnings, but you can also choose your own for maximum flexibility.

4. Shopify domain name generator

Similar to Lean Domain Search, Shopify’s name generator searches for .com domains with good and common prefixes and suffixes. You can use the tool by simply searching for words associated with your business, or you can be creative and type in multiple keywords. While this tool was made to help sell Shopify’s apps, you can use it to find your domain name and buy it somewhere else too.

Conclusion

You don’t have to buy a pre-registered .com domain for thousands of dollars if you use the above tools to help you find a good name. There are a few times where buying expensive names can be okay, but for the most part if you are building a new site or company, saving money on domain names can be a great incentive.