6 THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN CHOOSING A DOMAIN NAME FOR YOUR PROBATE WEBSITE
via Katt Wagner
“Woah, I’ve got to come up with a domain name for a second website?!”
Agents and Investors often create separate websites for the probate side of their businesses and sometimes create a separate business entity for their probate deals. The rationale here is that offering value to families in probate means offering more options than just “real estate” solutions. Creating a separate website is a great way to take off your real estate hat and brand yourself as the solution for any number of problems someone in probate might be facing. Accomplishing this means you’re much more likely to be the go-to when a personal representative’s real estate needs become the priority.
Pretty simple, right?
The problem is, I still see many real estate agents and investors set their probate website up as something that mirrors their regular real estate website. Their website screams “I’M A REAL ESTATE AGENT” or “I’LL BUY YOUR INHERITED HOUSE, CASH, 7 DAYS!”
The website they set up to develop a probate brand that stands apart from their main real estate brand, is accomplishing the opposite of what they intended.
I wanted to share some tips for avoiding the biggest probate website mistake people make: choosing a poor domain name. Whether you find it hard to think of a name from scratch, or you’re having trouble shaking the notion that your URL MUST include a mention of real estate, the following tips will greatly improve your overall approach to your probate branded website.
- Use a Brand Name: A brand name makes a massive difference in how memorable you and your offer are. Your probate brand name doesn’t need to be the same as your real estate brand name, and it most likely should be quite different. This brand name will give you something to use across all marketing efforts. Using a memorable brand name in your website URL will make it easier for people to find your website online.
- Make The Name Unique – You do not want to compete with a domain name that’s already established and ranking well. In other words, if “ProbateAgent .com” is taken, choosing “TheProbateAgent .com” might be confusing to people looking for your website, and you’ll be competing with the pre-existing website for search rankings. The less competition you have to deal with, the better.
Tip: Need some ideas to get you started? Check out Shopify’s business name generator for inspiration. - Make It Memorable: Memorable and Unique have their overlap, but they are not the same. If you’re like most people, you type a brand name and run a search when you don’t remember a company’s exact URL. If all goes well, the company you’re looking for will show right at the top of the results and you’re good to go. But if not, then what?
Or what if you can’t even remember the brand name you wanted to search for in the first place? - Make it Easy To Type: Avoid words that are hard to spell; a best practice is to keep it phonetic and make sure the name you choose is spelled the way it sounds. While it might seem tempting to add hyphens and numbers to your domain name (as it often makes the domain name cheaper to purchase), it’s harder to remember and harder to tell someone about verbally.
The harder it is for someone to type your URL exactly as it is, the harder it is for someone to successfully land on your website. So before you use Probate-agent .com because probateagent .com is taken, remember that anyone who leaves out the hyphen will become somebody else’s web traffic. - Think Long Term: It costs time, money, branding, and SEO juice to change a domain name. If you think there’s a chance you might expand your team, service area, or business offerings, take this into consideration when choosing a domain name. Limiting your brand to your personal name, geographic space, or a single service offering today could inhibit growth in the future. Consider whether you will need an all-encompassing brand and if so, start building it now. Remember, you can also create subdomains specific to different markets and niche offerings to keep everything located in one home base.
- Check Availability and Current Usage. KnowEm.com is a cool tool that will allow you to search your potential name and show you if that name is available on social networks, any trademarks already registered to the name, and of course if domains using that name are available or taken.
Consider also running a search for your prospective name on a few search engines and social media platforms to get an idea of current results. Do popular brands come up first in the results? Are the results relatively quiet? Does the search engine/social media platform suggest relevant results, or is the prospective name too vague to interpret? Searching prospective names can help spark some great ideas for improvements.
The most important takeaway from all of this is that you should treat your domain name as a brand name, and you want that brand name to be unique, memorable, and a reflection of the value you can offer. There are plenty of resources out there that dive more deeply into domain names and the technical aspects of SEO, as well as the psychology behind brand names and their impact.
Instead of cramming your name, market, and a bunch of keywords in a domain name, invest some time and thought into choosing a really great and future-forward brand name. After all, your website is the online home of your brand.
Exhausted after picking out a domain name? We can handle the rest of the site for you: Probate Websites made Easy.
