Claim Your Cyber Territory – Marketing
The second stage in our medical aesthetic business marketing blog series is to look at domain registration.
A domain name is the name of a website: cosmeticcourses.co.uk , for instance, is our teaching and training company. This is also known as the URL (uniform resource locator). Mr. Adrian Richards of Cosmetic Courses owns adrianrichards.com. But who owns variations of this, such as adrianrichards.co.uk? He tried to buy this some years ago but it was already taken by a professional person from Shropshire! Whilst researching this article, he looked it up again and this person has not renewed the registration so we have added it to our portfolio.
This is an activity you should consider performing at regular intervals to ensure that competitors are not gaining traffic for terms related to your business.
Buying Domain Names – Marketing
It can cost from under £10 a year to buy yourname.co.uk. To find out if your name is available, simply search for domain registration companies on Google and a search bar will appear. Type in your name and select .co.uk and you will see if it is available. Generally most of the more common names are taken but if you are called something unusual you may well find that it is available.
In recent years, more and more people have become aware of the value of URL’s and it is very rare to find any one or even two word combinations left. Some investment and pension schemes are even starting to value URL’s as a valuable asset which are increasing in value and are adding these to their portfolios.
You will see that there are many variations of domain endings available. (.com .biz .edu etc.) Names ending in .coms are the most popular and therefore most expensive as they are not county specific. Amazon.com for instance is the international version of Amazon, whereas Amazon.co.uk is the UK branch. If you live and work in the UK, we would advise you to buy the .co.uk version as it is likely to appear higher in searches performed within the UK.
What Happens Once You Have Bought Your Domain?
Once you have purchased your domain name, it will be registered to you and if you have entered your card details and selected the automatic renew it can be yours for as long as you want.
Once you have your domain name or names, you need to make sure they are registered to you at your address- this way you have control over them. A favorite ruse of many web design firms is for you and them to choose the name of a website and they then register it in their name. This means that technically you may not own it although you have paid for the website. In most cases this is fine but if you ever want transfer your website or have it re-designed by another company the fact that you do not own the domain may come as an unpleasant surprise.
Many astute people realized the power of domain names in the early days of internet marketing and registered lots of them for under £10. They are now worth many times this; just recently I received an offer to buy plasticsurgeon.co.uk for a figure over £10,000. Is it worth it? Why would I want it? The main reason is that URL’s containing an exact match for the term a user enters into Google are more likely to appear higher in a Google search. If I search for ‘plastic surgeon’ in Google (all other factors being equal) plasticsurgeon.co.uk will appear higher than adrianrichards.co.uk.
There is a group of experts who scour the market for high value lapsed domain names. This means that if either a large company or individual fail to re-register their domain name, after a period of time the domain is released to the first person to buy at the normal rate of under £10. This way it is possible to obtain a valuable asset for a minimal cost.
In our next Marketing Your Business Online Blog…Creating A Winning Website! If you are interested in more in-depth business marketing training for the medical aesthetics industry, Cosmetic Courses are experts in providing this. Call us today on 01844 390110 or [email protected]
