When you’re choosing a domain name for your business website, it’s worth considering whether including your business location or sector would be beneficial.
Local identity
Businesses operating in a defined local market will probably benefit from having their location as part of their business web address. An egg producer in St Albans selling only to the local area might want to register herts-eggs.co.uk, for example.
Similarly, businesses selling products which have a strong local identity, or the location as a selling point (Melton Mowbray pork pies, Cheddar cheese, Scotch whisky etc) might also benefit from having the location within the website name.
One thing to bear in mind is that a .co.uk domain name ending will automatically define your business as being UK-specific. So there wouldn’t be much benefit in registering – for example – ‘UKproducts.co.uk’. However, ‘UKproducts.com’ would help emphasise that your business is based in the UK, for an international audience.
Availability
The choice of whether to include a location or business sector into a URL may be determined by availability. Hundreds of millions of domain names have already been registered, and more are being registered every hour of every day.
For example, Joe Bloggs the accountant is highly likely to find that joebloggs.co.uk has already been registered – but joebloggs-accountancy.co.uk might still be free.
Search engine rankings
Search professionals don’t agree on whether including keywords (such as location or business sector) in your URL directly helps search engines rank your site more highly for those words.
However, it could help if other websites list your URL to link to your site – as links to your site using relevant terms will boost your search engine rankings for those terms.
