Why You Should Own Multiple Domains for Your Business

If you’re like most individuals and businesses online, you are likely investing time, energy and money to send visitors to destinations you do not own or control. Marketing phrases such as “Follow me on Twitter” and “Like Us on Facebook” might be commonplace, but they are not necessarily helping you truly build your community. That’s where multiple custom domains can help. Because otherwise, you are training your customers, followers and fans to search for you at third-party destinations where they are likely to face many potential distractions along the way. In essence, you are giving up your identity in favor of someone else’s brand. Using custom domains for your web addresses can help you build your unique brand and claim your space online. How to decide how many domains you should buy? By using logical and relevant custom domains as pointers to your social networks or other alternative online locations, you ensure your audience ends up in the right place — and you continue to build your identity and brand. But how do you pick which domains and how many? Misspellings One of the most important reasons to purchase more than one domain is to protect against user error. Because there is the potential for people to misunderstand what your domain name is when they hear it or make a mistake when typing it, you’ll want to make it a priority to own all common misspellings of your company’s name. Local Competition For SEO purposes, business with various locations that cater to different audiences often take advantage of owning specific domains for each. If you have a keyword strategy in mind for your local market, having an individual domain for each one will help you take up more “real estate” in search results. Better Branding for Your Business You could also register generic top-level domains (gTLDs), such as .store or .pro, to target various communities and highlight segments of your business. If you already have a traditional domain ending like .com or .net, purchasing a domain with a different TLD alongside it may allow you to stand out from the crowd and highlight a specific focus of your brand. People Can/Will Buy Your Domain To Trick People Cybercrime can come in different shapes and sizes: hosting malware, phishing content and other scams. If your business name is available, they will buy it. At that point, you *maybe* could try and ask them to sell it to you… but then they could charge any price they want to sell it back to you. Same goes if a very common misspelling of your domain name is still available. What do to with all these domains When you register a domain, there is no requirement to create a website for it. You can simply set it up so that anyone who visits it is redirected to another website. With most registrars, it’s easy to forward multiple domains to your website so you can simply create one site and then redirect visitors who type one of your other domain names to that one website. Perhaps it is time to let go of the single domain, portal mentality, and open yourself up to a marketing and branding strategy that utilizes multiple custom domains to create logical and memorable links to all your online locations.