In this day and age, SEO is considered a cornerstone of any effective SEO campaign. Keeping in mind that as much as 94% of all online experiences start with a search engine (in most cases, Google) and that only 10% of all users go to the second SERP page to find what they look for, it should be very clear why is that so.
All these facts put great pressure on SEO to fulfill its potential and deliver the desired results, so SEO experts constantly look for new ways to leverage the various available assets to push the SEO numbers as far as possible.
Let us take a look then at how domain name factors into this entire story and how you can use this simple asset to boost SEO campaigns.
Make the domain name ‘brandable’
Although these days the domain name is not considered to be a direct ranking factor by Google and all other search engines, your final SERP ranking will be influenced by a whole variety of other mentions like bounce rate, click-through, rate, time spent on the website and so one. With that in mind, choosing a domain name that is easy to brand like, for instance, Apple.com and Google.com will invite far more users than convoluted, unclear, and overthought alternatives.
Ideally, your domain name should feature the following properties:
- Be simple to write down
- Be simple to spell and pronounce
- Be able to stand out from the competition
- Be unique
Keep it simple and avoid the hyphens
Branding opportunities are great, but while you are looking for a catchy name be sure to remember that effective names are short (ideally somewhere between 6 and 14 characters), easy to type, and feature no hyphens or all other special signs whatsoever. Also, the websites like Google.com may give you an impression that repeated consecutive letters are a good sign, but putting the same letters next to each other is generally considered a bad SEO practice.
If you, for instance, use the spelling ‘shoop’ instead of ‘shop’ you will get something memorable but also confuse users, search engines, and autocorrect tools, especially if you put two such words together.
Use creative domains for better effect
So, if we on the one hand have a necessity for creative domain names for a stronger branding effect and the limiting factors we have just mentioned on the other, what can we do to make the domain names of our websites more effective? One of the solutions comes in the form of popular .me domains and other similar alternatives that allow you to engage in a sort of wordplay without stuffing the actual domain name overly complex and longer than necessary.
Furthermore, creative domain extensions also allow you to effectively use the keywords. Using the same keywords in the domain name, title, meta description, and inside the article can drastically boost your SEO efforts.
Make the website fast and responsible
Now, let’s quickly cover a couple of important facts regarding the importance of web hosting. According to recent research, 53% of consumers will leave your website if it fails to load within no more than three seconds. Also, other surveys indicate that 79% of online shoppers who are not satisfied with the website’s performance will stop using that site indefinitely.
That is why the website’s speed and accessibility play a tremendously important role in the process of SEO even though it doesn’t directly deal with any of its keyword-related facets. Your goal, therefore, should be to find the web hosting services that will cut down the bounce rate, prevent you from losing the website traffic and thus make your SEO campaigns more effective.
Try to increase the website security
Last but not least, we would like to touch upon another hosting-related topic that ultimately has a strong influence on the efficiency of your SEO campaigns and that is website security. Now, a number of different ways your website can be hacked are too numerous to cover but all these scenarios, in the end, cause similar SEO issues:
- Hacks produce “Error 404 — Content not found” and, in turn, cause crawling errors
- The hacking attempts compromise the user experience and turn the visitors away from the website
- Low data security prevents users from ever visiting the website
- Hacking compromises the ranking signals causing your website to be flagged as ‘Not secure’ by Google
You can solve a lot of these problems by looking for web hosting services that will offer added security to your website even if it requires investing a bit more money.
In conclusion
We hope this short breakdown gave you a general idea about how web hosting and the domain name can influence the results of your SEO campaigns and even more importantly ho you can turn these factors into assets. Even though neither of these things is considered to be SEO ranking factors the way they are implemented can drastically affect other items and processes that are actually on the list. So make sure you use them to the fullest extent – the present-day business world is too competitive to leave things like these on the table.