Can we have differnt Domain name and Busienss name?
-
Can we have different domain and Business name for website?
I want to create real-estate website. I want to registered domain name ‘Nycityhomes.com’ and want to my business name (in logo as well) is ‘Sunny Associates’. Can we do that for local SEO?
-
Hi Alexander,
Google says that one website is better than two, and I almost never recommend that any local business publish more than one website, because of the risk this puts them at for NAP inconsistency, duplicate and merged listings as well as often creating thin/duplicate content risks.
Google's opinion, as voiced by John Mueller, can be found here:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/rOb2jIctBLQ/discussion
So, honestly, my advice is to go with just one site, Alexander.
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for a great advice. What If I create 2 websites, first with brand name "SunnyAssociates.com" (business portfolio website) and 2nd "Nycityhomes.com" with SunnyAssociates logo?.
Nycityhomes.com will have all the property listing and SunnyAssociates.com will have my business details, about us, services, company history etc.
-
Hi Alexander,
Great question. There is no one, right answer to this question. On the one hand, it's true that having keywords (like 'homes' and 'ny') can give you a bit of leverage in the search engine results. On the other hand, having a generic keyword-oriented domain name always stands out as having been chosen largely for search engines rather than out of company pride or with the user in my mind.
My personal preference is generally to go with the brand name. This is name the you're trying to promote as 'the' authoritative resource in your field and a branded domain shows a lot of confidence and pride in your brand. After all, Moz.com doesn't contain a keyword. The domain name for this company isn't terrificinboundmarketingresource.com. Rather, Moz has put in the years and effort to build a brand that stands for something with its community and, at this point, it would actually be negative rather than positive if the domain name was keyword-oriented rather than brand-oriented.
So, I would encourage most businesses to reflect on the fact that their domain name is going to be their home base for years to come, and that having one that matches what the phone receptionist says when she picks up the phone is a good plan for building a recognized brand. You're going to have to make a superior effort to surpass competitors in the SERPs, anyway, and while some SEOs may feel that any little bit of leverage can help (such as a keyword-oriented domain), chances are this won't be enough to help you pass up the competition in a tough market.
An alternative is to build some keywords into a domain name, like sunnyassocnyhomes.com, but that can start to get rather long and messy. Some people are good a finessing this. You could try brainstorming a bunch of domain name ideas and see if you can come up with a good brand-keyword combo so that you're showing both pride in your brand and sensitivity toward keywords.
In the end, this is a highly personal choice. One last thought. When I'm looking at real estate and I see domains in the results, I'm personally more likely to click on Century21.com, that's earned its place in the SERPs through building a strong brand, than I am to click on homesforsalemycity.com, because I feel immediately suspicious that this may be just another low quality aggregate site (so many of which clutter up the results and provide little satisfaction). So, were I to see SunnyAssociates.com coming up for my search, that would signal to me that your brand has earned its place in the SERPs based on merit, rather than having squeaked into the mix with keywords.
Hope these thoughts are helpufl
-
Branding a business name with the domain is is always key but if you like that domain name that go with it, i would buy sunnyassociates.com if its available and point it to your other domain name so you have both in case one day you decide to use it.
-
Actually for marketing on the web, it is smart to do that. If you domain has keywords that are important to your marketing keywords, it is better. Sunny Associates could be anything, whereas a real estate website called "nycityhomes.com" is of good value immediately for the keyword or phrases like NY City Homes for Sale or Rent. On your expansion pages you might even have some that look like this. www.nycityhomes.com/new-york-city-homes/rent.php or manhattan.php My company name is Diversified Freight, and I have that domain, but I also have www.freightetc.com which has the keyword "freight" in it. The only thing with the example above is you don't want your URL's too long so watch that. I am fairly new on here, and have a lot to learn myself, but you can never go wrong with a domain that directly uses your keywords needed in the market place!
-
I don't see why not, I can think of many examples where the business name does not match the website address.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Temporary Domain Changes
Hi All, Our development team needs to do a temporary site name change from www.sitename.com to new.sitename.com and then wants to return to www.sitename.com. They need to do this for the whole site due to how it's built with single sign on (SSO) and how certain post login pages utilize pre login pages and need to keep people logged in. This process is changing with a CMS upgrade and website and post login pages will be independent of the pre login pages moving forward. My question is what is the best way to manage this transition? Right now it seems like the best solution I've been able to work out with development is to reduce the domain shift down to one week and use 302 Redirects, don't index the new.sitename.com site, and for that week and take my lumps as they come from search. Looking for any other suggestion that may help marketing work with dev without casting blame on any teams for drops in organic traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dapacifi0 -
Translated Content on Country Domains
Hi, We have blogs set up in each of our markets, for example http://blog.telefleurs.fr, http://blog.euroflorist.nl and http://blog.euroflorist.be/nl. Each blog is localized correctly so FR has fr-FR, NL has nl-NL and BE has nl-BE and fr-BE. All our content is created or translated by our Content Managers. The question is - is it safe for us to use a piece of content on Telefleurs.fr and the French translated Euroflorist.be/fr, or Dutch content on Euroflorist.nl and Euroflorist.be/nl? We want to avoid canonicalising as neither site will take preference. Is there a solution I've missed until now? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoeuroflorist
Sam0 -
Can you spot the differences?
Well, I have been scratching my head on this for days, I will try throwing the ball to you with hopes someone more experienced than me can help. The scenario is: e-commerce -> brand page -> SERP -> comparison between how two pages rank; one from my website, one from a competitor website. The brand is Michelin, the keyword is "pneumatici michelin" (equivalent in italian of “michelin tires”). I am not looking at SERP first page, where competition is surely much more fierce. I am looking at position 11: http://www.cambio-gomme.it/marchi/michelin/ And my page (not in the first 50): http://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/michelin My page: MOZ Page Grade (for keyword “pneumatici michelin”): A External backlinks to the page: 1 Domain Authority: 29 Page Authority: 24 On-page SEO optimization: keyword density: 0.87% internal links: 145 external links: 3 page size: 108kb html size: 24kb words on page: 2077 link-words: 408 non-linked words: 1669 time to first byte: 0.419s Competitor page: MOZ Page Grade (for keyword “pneumatici michelin”): A External backlinks to the page: 0 Domain Authority: 26 Page Authority: 13 On-page SEO optimization: keyword density: 0.75% internal links: 70 external links: 1 page size: 31kb html size: 9kb words on page: 1521 link-words: 168 non-linked words: 1353 time to first byte: 0.373s Domain age is very similar, both websites launched close to each other in 2012. Ideas? Suggestion on other metrics to compare?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | max.favilli0 -
SEO connectivity between domains and sub-domains
Hi, My web site georgerossphotography.com and my ecommerce site store.georgerossphotography.com each reside on different servers. georgerossphotography.com has a domain authority of 30 store.georgerossphotography.com has a domain authority of 30 Clearly, they are considered two individual sites but is there any way that I can boost the performance of the primary domain by passing along some for that good SEO juice from the sub-domain? Any input would be gratefully received. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sirgeorge0 -
301 Redirect from unused domain
Hi All First question here so go easy.. I have a property site which is working well so far considering it;s early days, unfortunately some of my earlier efforts did not go so well and one in particular I pretty much destroyed in my attempts to improve the site SEO. Lucky enough my SEO skills have improved quite a bit lately, largely thanks to the great tools, tutorials and experts here at Moz 🙂 My question is whether I can use a 301 redirect to pass the domain authority and any link equity from an unused site to the one that ive done a better job on? it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy... Thanks everyone and thanks for all the help over the last 6 months or so.. Wes Dunn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wesdunn19771 -
Migrating EMD to brand name domain. Risk of Penguin Penalty?
We would like to migrate from an EMD to a brand name domain, since our service offer has become much broader than indicated by the current EMD. The current domain name is a money keyword. Do you believe there is a big risk of suffering a penguin penalty if we go ahead with the domain migration, due to large share of anchor texts containing keyword of old domain name? Quick facts about our site:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
-about 500.000 pages indexed by google PR6 10 years old 1200 linking root domains 30% of linking root domains contain our domain name with domain ending as anchor text 5% of linking root domains have just the domain keyword as anchor text Any thoughts?
Thanks0 -
Is it safe to 301 redirect old domain to new domain after a manual unnatural links penalty?
I have recently taken on a client that has been manually penalised for spammy link building by two previous SEOs. Having just read this excellent discussion, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience I am weighing up the odds of whether it's better to cut losses and recommend moving domains. I had thought under these circumstances it was important not to 301 the old domain to the new domain but the author (Lewis Sellers) comments on 3/4/13 that he is aware of forwards having been implemented without transferring the penalty to the new domain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience#jtc216689 Is it safe to 301? What's the latest thinking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy0 -
Large Scale Domain Forwarding
I recently purchased a domain from a domainer who owns and parks many, many exact match domains in my niche. He gets a lot of type in traffic via these domains and is willing to forward them to my domain to help get my site started with traffic. We were planning on forwarding a few dozen domains at the most. I'd like to make sure I'm not raising any red flags with google for forwarding so many domains to a new site. I found this article, which says Panda made some changes with regards to what I'm trying to do here. Not sure if they guy is right though. http://domainate.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/how-google-panda-affected-domain-forwarding-and-what-to-do-about-it/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | terran0