How to Choose a Domain Name

Choose the name people can hear, not the name that reads well

The test that matters is not how the name looks in a proposal. It is whether somebody can say it once over the phone, in a noisy shop, and have the other person type it correctly on the first try. That single criterion eliminates most bad domain names before any other consideration.

Everything else follows from it:

• Short beats long. Fewer characters means fewer chances to mistype.
• Your business name beats a keyword phrase, because your business name is what people will remember and what they will be told by the neighbor who recommended you.
• Take the .com if you can get it. Not because search engines prefer it, but because it is what people type by reflex when they have half-forgotten the ending.
• No hyphens. Nobody says the word hyphen out loud, and everybody forgets them.
• Avoid numerals, or buy both spellings, because a customer hearing the number four does not know whether to type the digit or the word.
• Read it as one string before you buy it. Words that are innocuous separately sometimes are not when run together, and that discovery is much cheaper before the trucks are lettered.

The endings: .com, .net, and everything newer

The technical structure behind an ending is worth ten seconds of your time, because it explains who is responsible for what. A registry operates the ending and holds the authoritative database — Verisign runs .com and .net, Public Interest Registry runs .org. A registrar is accredited by ICANN, contracts with the registry, and sells to the public. A reseller sells under somebody else's accreditation, which is what most web hosts and web designers actually are. Your registrar of record is the accreditation holder, not the reseller, and that distinction matters enormously when the reseller stops answering email.

On the practical choice:

• .com is the default for a commercial business and worth paying a little more for.
• .net is a reasonable second choice when the .com is genuinely gone, and it is far easier to dictate over a phone than a novelty ending.
• .org has no eligibility restriction whatsoever. It is an open ending that anyone may register. It does not prove that an organization is a nonprofit and it never has.
• Newer endings carry no search penalty at all. Their cost is human: the person hearing it may not believe the ending is real, may type .com anyway, and may not find you. That is a real cost even though it is not a technical one.
• A geographically modified .com — adding your town or the lake to your business name — usually beats a novelty ending for a business whose customers hear the name spoken across a counter.

One thing not to do: buying the .net, the .org, the .biz and every misspelling because you already own the .com. A defensive portfolio is a bill that recurs forever and protects against almost nothing. The two honest exceptions are a misspelling you can actually observe customers typing, and a variant a competitor could plausibly use to intercept you.

Do keywords in a domain still help? Much less than people think

This is where most of the folklore lives, so it is worth being precise about what is documented and what is repeated.

On endings, Google has stated its position directly. Its guidance on new top-level domains says its systems treat new endings like any other, and that keywords in a top-level domain give no advantage or disadvantage in search (Google Search Central). So a name ending in a keyword buys nothing on that axis.

On keywords in the name itself, the honest summary is that exact-match keyword domains are not the ranking lever they were in the mid-2000s, and treating one as a strategy in 2026 is buying a tactic that stopped working a long time ago. What a domain full of keywords does reliably do is three other things: it is harder to say, it is harder to remember, and it makes you sound like a directory rather than a business. A name that is genuinely descriptive can still be useful for a human reading a search result — there is nothing wrong with the word plumbing appearing in a plumber's domain — but that is a clarity benefit, not a ranking one.

The version of this that costs money is buying a second domain packed with keywords and pointing it at your site, or building a thin second site on it. You now maintain two names, two renewals and two sets of confusion, in exchange for a benefit nobody has been able to demonstrate for years. If somebody proposes it, ask them what specific documented behavior they are relying on.

The phone test, applied properly

Say the candidate name aloud to somebody who has never seen it written, and ask them to type it. Watch what they get wrong. The failures are predictable:

• Doubled letters at word boundaries. When one word ends with the letter that starts the next, listeners hear one letter and type one.
• Homophones. Anything containing to, too, two, for, four, your or you're will be typed both ways.
• Words with two accepted spellings in ordinary use, and trade words your customers spell differently from the way your trade does.
• Hyphens and underscores. Hyphens are never heard. Underscores are not valid in a domain name at all, and people try them anyway.
• Long compounds. Past roughly twenty characters, error rates rise sharply for no benefit.
• Abbreviations that are ambiguous when spoken, including initials that sound alike over a phone.

If the name fails this test badly, change the name. If it fails mildly and predictably in one specific way — a real, observed mistype that customers actually make — that is the one case where registering the variant and redirecting it is worth the recurring cost. Check your server logs or your call notes rather than guessing, because guessing produces a portfolio of ten domains that nobody has ever typed.

Check for trademark conflicts before you buy anything

A registrar's search box answers exactly one question: is this string already registered. It does not tell you whether you are entitled to use the name, and those are entirely different questions. A domain can be perfectly available and still be a trademark you cannot trade under, which is how a business ends up rebranding after printing signage, lettering trucks and buying uniforms.

The checks are free and take about half an hour:

1. Search the federal trademark register at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (uspto.gov) for the name and for names that sound like it. Marks are registered within classes of goods and services, so a similar name in a wholly unrelated industry may be irrelevant — and a similar name in yours is a warning.
2. Search the Texas Secretary of State for state-registered marks and for entity names, and check assumed name filings at the county level in Kaufman, Henderson or Van Zandt County, depending on where you operate.
3. Search the plain web for the name plus your trade, and plus nearby towns. Existing businesses with unregistered names still hold rights built up through use, and being second in the same market is a problem even without a registration.
4. Search social platforms for the handle, because discovering the name is taken everywhere after you commit is its own kind of expensive.

None of this is legal advice and none of it replaces a trademark attorney, which is a sensible hour to buy if you are naming something you intend to build a business around. But the searches above catch the obvious collisions, and the obvious collisions are the ones that actually happen to small businesses.

What to do at the registrar on the day you buy it

Registration is a lease of one to ten years, not a purchase, and the administrative choices you make in the first five minutes are the ones that matter years later:

• Register it in the legal name of the business, with the owner's own email address as the registrant contact, in an account whose password the owner personally holds. Not the designer's account. Not an employee's personal address.
• Turn on two-factor authentication at the registrar, on the owner's phone.
• Turn on auto-renew, and register for several years ahead. Multi-year registration is not a ranking signal and should never be sold as one; it is simply cheap insurance against forgetting.
• Leave the registrar transfer lock on. That lock is normal and protective, and you remove it yourself when you genuinely want to move.
• Check the renewal price, not the first-year price. A domain offered at an unusually low first-year rate is subsidized by something.
• Do not move the domain to your web host because the host asked. Registration, DNS and hosting are three separate things. Pointing the nameservers, or changing a single record, is all that hosting a site anywhere actually requires. A host that insists on holding the registration is telling you something for free.
• Skip the checkout add-ons that repackage auto-renew and registrar lock as protection or monitoring. Both are free and both are already available to you.

One more note on privacy. Since ICANN retired the legacy WHOIS service in January 2025, public registration data is served through RDAP, and registrant contact fields for most domains are heavily redacted by default whether or not you pay for privacy. Paid privacy still does a job in the fields that are published and for endings where redaction does not apply, but the old pitch that your home address will otherwise be published for anyone to read is much weaker than it was. Look up your own record first and see what is actually visible.

The mistake that costs more than every other one combined

Whatever else you decide, do not let a designer, an agency, a marketing company or a well-meaning volunteer register the domain in their own name. It is the most common and by far the most expensive mistake a small business makes online, and it costs nothing to avoid.

The reason is mechanical rather than moral. ICANN's transfer rules look at the Registered Name Holder field. Paying the invoice does not put you there. If the person in that field stops answering, moves on, closes their business or dies, the business has no simple claim to the name printed on its trucks, and the routes to recovery are a trademark proceeding or a lawsuit — each of which costs more than the entire website did. The test takes one minute: can you log in to your registrar right now, without calling anybody? If not, that is the most urgent item in your entire web presence, ahead of the design, the content and the search rankings.