When you used to “let your fingers do the walking” through the Yellow Pages to find a particular service, there always seemed to be a strange sort of competition for how many times one could list the letter A in the beginning of a company name. AAAnimal Veterinarian, AAutomotive Repair Shop, AAAAhh Choo Allergist. Because phone directories list companies in alphabetical order, the thought was that getting listed at the top would put you in a better position to be contacted.

With the arrival of the Internet, choosing a company name that will get noticed has become a little more challenging. It’s no longer an alphabetical exercise but rather a .com race.  Who can snag the .com address first? If you’re in the stages of naming a new business you better be using a tool like www.register.com to see if your company name is taken, or you might be left in the cold with a less desirable .net or .biz address for your website….or heaven forbid, a domain name with a  strange hyphenated, abbreviated version of your company name.

Also, please don’t forget to consider how your company name will look like when smushed together. For example, Therapist Finder may seem like a wonderful company name, but domain name, therapistfinder.com can, well….sound like you are offering an entirely different service. You can read some other unfortunate domain names here.

Having said all of this, if you do happen to find yourself in a position where you do not want to change your company’s name and cannot secure a desirable .com address, there is still hope. With the search bar prominent on most everyone’s browser, people very often search the Internet for particular companies via the search bar rather than the address bar. This means that even if you have a .net or .biz address, if your website is built well by a design and copywriting team that understands and implements SEO (ahem, like the designers and writers at corecubed), you stand a good chance of being near the top of the search results and getting noticed.

There is also some interesting research showing that as the .com market becomes saturated, other domain suffixes are growing in search popularity. Here are the top five web address searches (ranked by volume) for July 2010:

.com 1.57 Billion (down 2% from July 2009)
.net   90 Million
.org 78 Million
.edu 39 Million
.gov 32 Million

Need help coming up with a meaningful, memorable and domain-worthy company name? Try the experts at corecubed. We’d love to learn about your business and fulfill your marketing needs.