Catchy names establish the marketing efforts of businesses, whether we're talking about online businesses or traditional 'brick-and-mortar' physical locations, or companies that use both approaches. They are the front line of your interaction with the public, the first part of your business that is put in front of people, giving them an opportunity to either want to know more about you or decide that they are not interested. Helping to guide potential customers toward you rather than away from you is absolutely critical of course, so it's clear that your business name has to be as engaging as possible.
There is an often-neglected aspect of business names that has become important just in the last five or 10 years. If you can afford a great location with plenty of drive-by traffic in the physical world you'll certainly have a leg up on your competition when it comes simply to being noticed by people walking or driving by. But there is an analogous challenge that you face regarding the online presence of your business, and you could make a case that as people search and find things more and more online, that this virtual searching on the Internet is rapidly becoming as relevant to your business as having that high-rent physical location. The good news is that you don't necessarily have to have an enormous ad budget to do well in your online marketing efforts. At least a
catchy name generator is easily found online.
But how to make it easier for people to find you online? The answer, at least in general terms, is not as complicated as you might fear. Search engines are the start of the vast majority of people's efforts to find something online, and there are a couple things you can do to help yourself when it comes to leading people to your business through search engines.
First of all, regardless of what your business is actually named, make sure that the domain name which houses your online business contains the product or service you sell right in it. The idea is that when people search for something search engines will ascribe relevance (relative to that exact search) to URLs for domain names that actually contain those search terms. It doesn't mean that by having 'Joe'sMinneapolisPlumbing-dot-com' as a domain name that you will automatically be number one in Google for the term 'Minneapolis plumbing'. What it does mean is that if plumbing is your business in Minneapolis, that all else being equal you'll do better in the search engine results pages for that search term if you have it in your domain name. Remember that even if the exact keyword is not available as a.com or.net, you can put another word like 'best' in the domain also and still help the search engine help people to find you.
Now, once searchers find your catchy name online it's up to you to convert them to customers, but by picking a search engine friendly name you will at least give yourself the opportunity to do that.
