The internet matters. URLs don’t.
Hi my name is Ben and I started using the internet when I was in the fourth grade. I sent an email that said, “Hi Brian” to my friend Brian who was sitting two feet to my right. It was magical.
These days I name companies and products, and I still write emails, sometimes to Brian. Hi Brian.
Here at A Hundred Monkeys we get a lot of clients asking us to help them find a suitable URL in addition to a great name. We happily conduct URL research for free when you work with us.
Most of the time our clients expect us to research a number of URLs that are easily registerable for normal registration rates. They ask this because they know the internet has reached a certain maturity and that URLs aren’t particularly important. They also know that everyenglishword.com has been previously registered and are for sale for enormous sums of money. So spending $500K or even $50K on acquiring those domains is a huge waste of resources.
However, there are times when folks ask us to prioritize the URL first and the name second. We always respond by saying this is a bad idea because you’ll end up smashing a bunch of letters together which mean nothing to no one, e.g. Slite or Guggy. WTF is a Guggy?
Even if you end up with a Guggy.com, the chances that having that .com helps people find you on the internet is next to nil because search and modern browsers make it so URLs don’t factor in to whether or not someone actually finds you.
Let’s test that theory and see why prioritizing yourname.com isn’t necessary. To do this, let’s search for a brand and see if we get hung up when it doesn’t have purename.com.
A disclaimer: the tools I use on the internet are google.com for search and Google Chrome for my browser.
Let’s start with a search.
I go to google.com or use the Omnibox in Chrome.
I’m looking for Blackbox, the fulfillment company created by the folks who made Cards Against Humanity. I type in “blackbox shipping.” I use the “shipping” keyword because keywords are helpful.
Here’s what we get.
The first thing I look at is which of these are ads and which aren’t. I skip the ads. Ads are dumb. Thanks ad blockers.
Then I check the headlines, in this case it’s “Blackbox.”
Often that’s enough of a clue that a certain result is the correct result. In this case, “Blackbox” is a clue but it’s pretty terse for a headline so I check the meta description and here’s what I saw: “A new shipping company for independent artists, from the creators of Cards Against Humanity.”
Bingo.
At no point did I check the URL. It never factored into my decision of making sure I was going to the correct page. I got everything I needed from the title, meta description (the most helpful in this case), and page rank. The home pages of brands are typically high on the first page of Google. They do a good job with that sort of thing.
Without looking at URLs, and instead of looking at headline, meta, and context, I’d say my batting average on finding the correct page using the Omnibox or the search engine known as Google is damn near a thousand. How could it not be? The internet has matured a lot since my “Hi Brian” email in 1997. Thank goodness.
So, when you’re creating a new brand, don’t stress over having yourname.com. People will find you. Instead, find a URL that you can register for normal rates and move on. Focus on what matters most: your brand.
