My Domain Name - short vs relevant

[VebianWebandMobileDevelopment]

I'm creating a website for my new web design company in Vancouver. I'm looking to target such keywords as "Web Design Vancouver", etc.

I have another company with a hyphenated domain name which is terrible when I'm on the phone and my client asks me for my domain (hard to say, always spelling it out).

Also I wanted to have a good snappy name for my new business so I found a 6 letter .com and matching .ca for my company.

My question is: is it best to use a short domain name or is it better have my keywords in the domain name?

eg. xyz.com vs xyzvancouverwebdesign.com

Thanks

[VebianWebandMobileDevelopment]

Thank you for your quick responses. I'm not going to purchase other domains such as xyzwebdesign.com as I'm only going to be SEOing one domain, in particular it will be xyz.ca, I do however own xyz.com and xyz.net and will 301 redirect those to the .ca.

Because I'm a company in Canada I figure I should optimize my .ca,  and make that my main domain and not my .com.

[zharriet]

What about getting both domain names anyway? I always thought it is good practice to buy the related domain names so the competition can't get them? You would redirect/point the longer name and the hyphenated names to the shorter one. I'm not sure of any seo benefits except the competition doesn't benefit from your name.

[vforvinnie]

That is what I was gonna suggest too. In general I favor short domains, even though bookmarking has come so far in the past 10 years.  Everyone bookmarks everything these days, so you don't need to worry as much about spelling and remembering a long name.  With that said I still like the short domains.

Branding will be a big part with the shorter, new domain name.  You can make up for the lack of keywords in the domain name with some quality content and strong, local links.

[BlinkWeb]

If you can get a really good relevant domain then go with that, but a hyphenated domain is not really good. I personally have found that I would rather go with short and easy, given the absence of good keyword domains.

SEO can't be my only strategy, especially for a new site, so being able to tell people about my site verbally and them find it easily is more important to me.

[Marcus_Miller]

I agree, get a great domain name that is short & user friendly and concentrate on building the brand. You can still SEO the site and as Elias mentioned, any benefit of exact match domains is being slowly chipped away so concentrate on your users.

I wish I had known what I know now when I registered my company and domain name!

[A_Q]

Hi Jonathan,

This is difficult....You have to balance the benefits for the visitors and the search engines.

Although, having relevant domain names still works for gaining good rankings it is not as powerful as it once was. It may eventually not be part of Google's algorithm at all with future updates.

Due to that fact alone I would go with the short name and concentrate on targeting Vancouver web design on-page and with links. I think this would help to future-proof your website and would be more user friendly.

On a side note - I would avoid hyphenated domain names as it is widely believed that Google uses this as a spam indicator.

I hope this helps!