Does Your Domain Affect Your SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a prevalent marketing strategy. You could say that because of increased competitiveness across most industry marketplaces, SEO should be considered mandatory for companies that employ and enjoy the benefits of digital marketing.

That said, every ranking signal counts. The marketplace across most online industries is oversaturated. The best way to ensure good visibility for your business is to rely on SEO as much as possible. That brings us to our title topic: Does your domain affect SEO? A few years ago, domains played an extremely important role in SEO. However, since a lot of businesses abused the so-called keyword stuffing activity to rank higher with help from EMD (Exact Match Domains), search engines such as Google changed their algorithms. The new algorithms have completely decreased the importance of domains and diminished the importance and severity of the effect a brand’s domain has on its SEO.

But does that mean that domains no longer affect SEO? No, quite the opposite is true. Domains are still important for SEO but not nearly as much as they were before. With that in mind, let’s see how domains do, in fact, affect your SEO.

Improved Visibility

As you already know, SEO helps websites rank high on search engines so that they can achieve constant visibility. A domain is an online address for your website, which means domain and SEO are, indeed, correlated. So, when it comes to online visibility, there are two perspectives you should have in mind.

One is the perspective of consumers and the other is the perspective of search engines. When you leverage SEO, you optimize for both of those perspectives.

In other words, you want to help both users and search engines understand the context and the content on your website. While search engines go into great detail to index your pages, consumers, on the other hand, see your domain first when conducting their online search. Therefore, search engines make the recommendation based on your ranking signals while your domain encourages consumers to visit your website.

When a relevant domain is combined with the right SEO practices and tactics, your business will favor more organic traffic, higher click-through rates and increased credibility and authority. You will also find your consumers begin to trust your brand more as you become their obvious choice.

Managing Your Optimization

As mentioned before, a domain can help encourage consumers to visit your website. However, once they do visit your website, you have to provide them with an exceptional experience. Otherwise, your domain name won’t mean much.

By optimizing your pages and content for search engines, you’re also ensuring that your website visitors enjoy a seamless browsing experience. That’s why a well-optimized website filled with top-quality and highly relevant content is essential. That said, here are a few basic but worthwhile practices for optimizing your website.

• Focus on technical SEO – These activities include improving your website loading speed, ensuring user-friendly navigation, employing responsive designs for mobile-friendliness, quality online security and the like.
• On-page optimization – This helps you optimize your pages and website content so that search engines can crawl and index everything properly. You must optimize keywords, meta descriptions, title tags, URLs, etc. Remember, Google has implemented mobile-first indexing, so make sure your site is mobile-friendly or your consumers will struggle to find you online, regardless of your marketing strategy and extensive SEO tactics.
• Off-page SEO – Guest posting, link building and social media posting are off-page activities that help you build credibility and authority for your website. Authoritative links and quality content combined with a memorable domain name will generate more exposure for your business.

Brand Awareness

Many companies today develop a brand as early as possible. Which makes sense if you consider excellent branding is how you ensure you stand out in your industry’s crowded marketplace. A lot of individual entrepreneurs are focused on developing a personal brand for the sake of online recognition and the numerous benefits it yields.

This brings us to branded domain names and their effect on SEO. Having your domain aligned with your business name is beneficial for long-term business growth and development. It will make your business memorable and easily recognizable in the online world, which is vital nowadays. Therefore, branded domain names are a form of keyword domains. In other words, they are SEO-friendly even if they might not have excellent ranking power.

Branded domains have a significant impact on consumers. With a branded domain name, you’re sending out relevancy and important brand signals to both search engines and consumers. That said, consumers will easily spot your business online just by recognizing your name, or in this case, your domain, which ultimately increases your brand awareness.

Domain Name Best Practices

In retrospect, a domain on its own doesn’t have a lot of ranking power in terms of SEO. However, when combined with good SEO practices, your domain can be the tip of the spear when it comes to effective marketing.

That said, you have to opt for a relevant and memorable domain so that SEO can work in your favor. A domain consists of a few vital factors and each factor must be considered carefully.

Here are some of the best practices for choosing the right domain name.

• Include an HTTPS – Domains that begin with “https://” are properly secured. Search engines consider this a ranking factor, whereas consumers generally avoid unsecured websites.
• World Wide Web – A “www” prefix should also be considered. Although not mandatory, there are some technical advantages to avoiding naked domains.
• Be memorable – Choosing a unique domain name, branded or otherwise, is good for both SEO and your website’s visibility.
• Choose the right TLD – Top-Level Domain (TLD) is one of the most important factors in your domain. TLDs, such as .com, .org, .info, and so on can make your website more credible and popular.
• Be short and simple – Domains with fewer than 15 characters are easy to remember. Also, make it simple. For example, hyphenated domains are often considered spam.
• Keyword domains – Whether you opt for a branded domain or not, keyword domains can help with SEO and recognition. Just don’t make the mistake of abusing keywords to rank better, or you’ll get penalized for keyword stuffing.

In the end, domains do affect your SEO in some ways. Even though domains aren’t the most important factor to consider for great rankings, domains play a critical role in your marketing efforts, in general. Choosing the right domain for your business is paramount, so your business can enjoy the benefits of being a recognizable brand in the crowded online market.