Can we have differnt Domain name and Busienss name?
-
Can we have different domain and Business name for website?
I want to create real-estate website. I want to registered domain name ‘Nycityhomes.com’ and want to my business name (in logo as well) is ‘Sunny Associates’. Can we do that for local SEO?
-
Hi Alexander,
Google says that one website is better than two, and I almost never recommend that any local business publish more than one website, because of the risk this puts them at for NAP inconsistency, duplicate and merged listings as well as often creating thin/duplicate content risks.
Google's opinion, as voiced by John Mueller, can be found here:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/rOb2jIctBLQ/discussion
So, honestly, my advice is to go with just one site, Alexander.
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for a great advice. What If I create 2 websites, first with brand name "SunnyAssociates.com" (business portfolio website) and 2nd "Nycityhomes.com" with SunnyAssociates logo?.
Nycityhomes.com will have all the property listing and SunnyAssociates.com will have my business details, about us, services, company history etc.
-
Hi Alexander,
Great question. There is no one, right answer to this question. On the one hand, it's true that having keywords (like 'homes' and 'ny') can give you a bit of leverage in the search engine results. On the other hand, having a generic keyword-oriented domain name always stands out as having been chosen largely for search engines rather than out of company pride or with the user in my mind.
My personal preference is generally to go with the brand name. This is name the you're trying to promote as 'the' authoritative resource in your field and a branded domain shows a lot of confidence and pride in your brand. After all, Moz.com doesn't contain a keyword. The domain name for this company isn't terrificinboundmarketingresource.com. Rather, Moz has put in the years and effort to build a brand that stands for something with its community and, at this point, it would actually be negative rather than positive if the domain name was keyword-oriented rather than brand-oriented.
So, I would encourage most businesses to reflect on the fact that their domain name is going to be their home base for years to come, and that having one that matches what the phone receptionist says when she picks up the phone is a good plan for building a recognized brand. You're going to have to make a superior effort to surpass competitors in the SERPs, anyway, and while some SEOs may feel that any little bit of leverage can help (such as a keyword-oriented domain), chances are this won't be enough to help you pass up the competition in a tough market.
An alternative is to build some keywords into a domain name, like sunnyassocnyhomes.com, but that can start to get rather long and messy. Some people are good a finessing this. You could try brainstorming a bunch of domain name ideas and see if you can come up with a good brand-keyword combo so that you're showing both pride in your brand and sensitivity toward keywords.
In the end, this is a highly personal choice. One last thought. When I'm looking at real estate and I see domains in the results, I'm personally more likely to click on Century21.com, that's earned its place in the SERPs through building a strong brand, than I am to click on homesforsalemycity.com, because I feel immediately suspicious that this may be just another low quality aggregate site (so many of which clutter up the results and provide little satisfaction). So, were I to see SunnyAssociates.com coming up for my search, that would signal to me that your brand has earned its place in the SERPs based on merit, rather than having squeaked into the mix with keywords.
Hope these thoughts are helpufl
-
Branding a business name with the domain is is always key but if you like that domain name that go with it, i would buy sunnyassociates.com if its available and point it to your other domain name so you have both in case one day you decide to use it.
-
Actually for marketing on the web, it is smart to do that. If you domain has keywords that are important to your marketing keywords, it is better. Sunny Associates could be anything, whereas a real estate website called "nycityhomes.com" is of good value immediately for the keyword or phrases like NY City Homes for Sale or Rent. On your expansion pages you might even have some that look like this. www.nycityhomes.com/new-york-city-homes/rent.php or manhattan.php My company name is Diversified Freight, and I have that domain, but I also have www.freightetc.com which has the keyword "freight" in it. The only thing with the example above is you don't want your URL's too long so watch that. I am fairly new on here, and have a lot to learn myself, but you can never go wrong with a domain that directly uses your keywords needed in the market place!
-
I don't see why not, I can think of many examples where the business name does not match the website address.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
High Quality Domains and what to do with them
Hi, I rus a travel photography business. The primary function of the website is to sell prints, though I blog about my travels on the same domain name as well as a few pieces of content that are helpful to users interested in some of the places I travel to. I do okay with it, but obviously, I am always looking for a way to increase visibility and sales of prints. I own a couple of high quality keyword domain names, that I've been trying to figure out what to do with. One of which is for a city that my prints of my photography are probably best known for. The domains I'm really trying to decide what to do with are basically a www.citystatephotography.com and www.citystatephotos.com, where the city and state are the ones I'm targeting. The question is, what do I do with it? I've seen various ideas from other photographers that have various levels of success. Here are the options I'm considering: Just redirect it to the photo gallery of photos that I'm trying to rank highly for. From what I read on various blogs, this doesn't really do much of anything, but maybe I've read wrong? Create a website or microsite with some quality content related to the city that also links back to my photography website on various places and possibly once in the navigation. I do have quality content I could put up that would be helpful to people from the city besides just trying to get sales. But there's always a chance this will cannibalize my original domain without helping sales, I assume? Spam my photo galleries across two domains. Most of my photography galleries would stay on my main domain that I already run, but the photo galleries that are key to that city would be hosted on that citystatephotography.com domain name. I've seen a photographer from Colorado do quite well with this method. (www.imagesofrmnp.com and www.morninglight.us) He's heavily known for his images of Rocky Mountain National Park and that seems to be his main brand, but all of his non-RMNP travel photography goes on the other site. The two sites look almost identical, though they link back and forth fairly extensively. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of duplicate content either. I've considered this method, but I'm nervous I'll kill what I've already built up if this were to fail. Do nothing with the domains. Seems wasteful, as these domains, particularly the citystatephotography.com domain seems useful in some way. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shannmg10 -
Is it safe to redirect our .nl (netherlands) domain that we have just purchased to our .com domain?
Hi all! We've recently developed a German version of our website with German translation and now we have just purchased a .nl domain, but with this one, we want all of the copy to remain in English. Is it ok to redirect our .nl domain to our current .com website or will this give us bad SEO points? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donaldsze0 -
Microsite as a stand-alone site under one domain and sub-domained under another: duplicate content penalty?
We developed and maintain a microsite (example: www.coolprograms.org) for a non-profit that lives outside their main domain name (www.nonprofit-mainsite.org) and features content related to a particular offering of theirs. They are utilizing a Google Grant to run AdWords campaigns related to awareness. They currently drive traffic from the AdWords campaigns to both the microsite (www.coolprograms.org) and their main site (www.nonprofit-mainsite.org). Google recently announced a change in their policy regarding what domains a Google Grant recipient can send traffic to via AdWords: https://support.google.com/nonprofits/answer/1657899?hl=en. The ads must all resolve to one root domain name (nonprofit-mainsite.org). If we were to subdomain the microsite (example: coolprograms.nonprofit-mainsite.org) and keep serving the same content via the microsite domain (www.coolprograms.org) is there a risk of being penalized for duplicate content? Are there other things we should be considering?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marketing-iq0 -
Root domain or sub domain? WWW. or NOT WWW......
I am a little confused! I use vidahost whom I have to say I find very helpful. I currently have the domains www.fentonit.co.uk and www.fentonit.com, now the websites was set up using the www.fentonit.com and I have www.fentonit.co.uk as a parked domain pointed to the www.fentonit.com. Confused yet? Now because I wanted the website to show www.fentonit.co.uk I added some code I was given by the guys to the .hta access file and viola up it comes as the .co.uk which is what I wanted. So if your still here and havent A: Killed yourself yet or B: Went to the Pub Then my questions are: 1. Is there going to be an issue from an SEO point of view having my site set up this way and if so how do I resolve it? 2. Would I be better using the root domain fentonit.co.uk (I think this is the root domain, although it iscurrently parked and pointed) as opposed to the sub www domain?.......and finally.......? 3. If it is set up as I stated what exactly would be my root domain, would it be the .co.uk or the .com? Sorry and I completely understand if your not interested in answering it but if you do.....Thanks in advance and I'll take you to the pub...lol Craig www.fentonit.co.uk ( i think)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | craigyboy1 -
Hosting images on multiple domains
I'm taking the following from http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html "Splitting components allows you to maximize parallel downloads. Make sure you're using not more than 2-4 domains because of the DNS lookup penalty. For example, you can host your HTML and dynamic content on www.example.org and split static components between static1.example.org and static2.example.org" What I want to do is load page images (it's an eCommerce site) from multiple sub domains to reduce load times. I'm assuming that this is perfectly OK to do - I cannot think of any reason that this wouldn't be a good tactic to go with. Does anyone know of (or can think of) a reason why taking this approach could be in any way detrimental. Cheers mozzers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob0 -
Changing my url name? Should I do it?
Hi, I am targeting a brand called Creative Recreation, who are a trainers brand. We currently rank ok-ish for certain terms for Creative Recreation Trainers, Footwear and Creative Recreation [INSERT STYLE NAME HERE]. Our main search term I think we would like to improve on is "creative recreation trainers" as we are 6th for this. Our domain name points to the brands page as designerboutique-online.com/all-clothing/creative-recreation/ Now what I want to know is, would it be worthwhile or would it affect my current rank/index if I changed the end of that url to read /creative-recreation-trainers/ thus getting the keyword phrase in the url? Creative-Recreation is a hard one to crack as you have a lot of competition from the brands site etc.. Any ideas on this? Cheers Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Bad neighborhood linking - anyone can share experience how significant it can impact rankings?
SEOMoz community, If you have followed our latest Q&A posts you know by now that we have been suffering since the last 8 months from a severe Google penalty we are still trying to resolve. Our international portfolio of sports properties has suffered significant ranking losses across the board. While we have been tediously trying to troubleshoot the problem for a while now we might be up to a hot lead now. We realized that one of the properties outside of our key properties, but are site that our key properties are heavily linking to (+100 outgoing links per property) seems to have received a significant Google penalty in a sense that it has been completely delisted from the Google index and lost all its PageRank (Pr4) While we are buffed to see such sort of delisting, we are hopeful that this might be the core of our experienced issues in the past i.e. that our key properties have been devalued due to heavy linking to a bad neighborhood site. My question two the community are two-fold: Can anyone share any experience if it is indeed considered possible that a high number of external links to one bad neighboorhood domain can cause significant ranking drops in the rank from being top 3 ranked to be ranked at around a 140 for a competetive key word? The busted site has a large set of high quality external links. If we swap domains is there any way to port over any link juice or will the penalty be passed along? If that is the case I assume the best approach would be to reach out to all the link authorities and have tem link to the new domain instead of the busted site? Thanks /Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro0 -
Domain certificate
Hello, I would like to know if there is any certificate we can buy to increase the Seo of my website. Thanks very much for your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cartageno0