The Death of the Domain Name

Late 2009 was witness to a select number of conservative advertisers including insurance giant GIO removing their domain names for TVC and print based advertising call to actions in favour of a search box with the appropriate business name typed in alongside the traditional phone number.

This move by top advertisers backs up trends we have been seeing in our site analytics for months. Users are now more likely to now simply use Google (or use another search engine) to search for a business name, rather than type the full domain in the browsers address bar. And why not, searching for the name will more likely give you quick access to the website homepage, instead of guessing at the domain name if you were not 100% familiar with the spelling or domain type. It also opens up access to internal pages quicker, say if you were searching specifically for business contact details.

So what does this mean for your business? It creates an even stronger argument for completion of an ongoing search engine optimisation campaign on your website to ensure that a) your website actually appears on all major search engines, b) secondly, the site is well optimised to your required keywords and a standard which search engines require and finally c) that you gain popularity by keyword rich, incoming links, the key to increasing your rank on your keywords and generate more traffic.

For more information, see Thomas Marsden's Search Engine Optimisation page.