A domain name is one of the most essential blocks in the foundation of your business. Aside from being synonymous with your business name, it’ll affect how much people remember and refer your brand to others.
This is why many established brands still think about purchasing more domain names. Because even if you have the right domain name, is it 100% effective in driving traffic? What happens when you need to move into a new market?
Acquiring multiple domain names is a great strategy for ensuring that everyone looking for your business finds it.
In this article, we’ll be sharing the top five reasons why multiple domains are a good business investment.
Better Targeting
If you have multiple user segments and you’re looking for a better way to target them, this is a good marketing strategy you can explore.
Set up a brand domain for your primary users and leverage a different domain for another niche. You’d then attract all of these audiences to your product designed for them.
So let’s say you’re an adventure brand called Jungle. While your primary domain name could be jungle.com, you can create a domain for targeting fashionable adventurers. This could be a shoe brand with a domain called jungleshoes.com. It’ll be different from the domain for camp tents and other products.
In scenarios like this, you can choose to play around with your domain content, copy, and marketing strategies to see how they function for different audiences.
A great example of this is Gettyimages.com. Being a stock photo agency, they collate and supply stock photos to businesses, agencies, and creatives in general. Rather than curating a single resource where they’d dump all images they create, they decided to create an opportunity to target their market individually.
They have three audiences which include creative professionals, the media, and corporate accounts. So, they purchased some domains and offered specific stock photos based on their target.
These domains are istock.com for corporate accounts, freeimages.com for creative professionals, and photos.com which target users who’d want a new frame.
For Business Expansion
Whether you’re a new or established business, you should always prepare for when your business starts to expand. This could be either when breaking into a new geographical market, rebranding, or creating more brands.
Here’s how multiple domains can benefit you in each of these scenarios;
New geographical markets
eCommerce giant Amazon started as a bookstore and today, you can purchase almost anything from their website. They’ve also expanded to multiple countries and have had to collate other country-specific domain extensions.
For example, you have the general Amazon.com but Amazon.co.uk for their customers in the United Kingdom.
If you’re going to operate at an international level, we recommend investing in country-specific domain names. Because if you want to dominate search results internationally, you need to redirect all these multiple country domains to your primary domain. This is one of the reasons Amazon is still the go-to for online shopping.
Rebranding
As an established brand, you might decide to rebrand sooner or later. This could mean changing your brand name and domain.
In this scenario, we recommend purchasing domains for both the old and new business names. Host your website on the new domain name and redirect users who land on the old domain name.
Product expansion
Your approach might be creating multiple products. You might want to diversify and create a range of smaller brands that’ll cater to very different audiences. Apple does this by offering Apple TV, Apple Music, the iPhone, and a range of other products.
If you’d want to do this, we recommend opening multiple domains for each of these products. You can then link them all to a primary domain. See how Planetart.com offers eight different products each leading to its unique domain.
Improved SEO
As a business, your domain name significantly affects your page rankings and so having multiple domains can increase your SEO visibility.
When you acquire multiple domains, you can also rank for more keywords. For each domain you choose, you can target specific keywords and phrases. You’d focus on creating content for these specific keywords and then repeat the process for your secondary domain – with a new selection of keywords.
Many businesses with multiple offerings usually target different audiences. And so, having a content strategy for each of these offerings helps rack up more slots in real estate. The best way to do this is by creating a new domain for content that’ll drive readers back to your website.
When you purchase multiple domains for SEO, you have to establish one as your primary domain. This will be your main domain name and other domains should be redirected here.
You can achieve this with a 301 redirect and make it a permanent redirect. With this, every ranking you get on your secondary domains will be channeled to the primary domain. This simply means a boost in your overall rankings from the accumulated search traffic.
So when setting up your sitemap for indexing, simply add 301 redirects so your business can be indexed properly. Plus you don’t have to worry about Google as they don’t penalize you for this.
Better Promotional Landing Pages
If you’re creating buzz for a new product or service, then having multiple domains in this case is a great marketing strategy. It’ll help create buzz around the product and drive website traffic.
This will make your promotions memorable and your sites easy to visit. For example, if you’re launching a donut franchise in your fast food business, rather than using paige.com/donuts as a domain, paigedonuts.com sells the product already. It’s also a food domain name that’s easier to remember.
So we recommend registering a new domain related to your product, service, or event and then creating a landing page for the promotion. Add pictures and content to your landing page. If possible, add a link to purchase that product online.
In our example below, storybrand.com creates a promotional landing page on their new domain buildingastorybrand.com. You’d see that they are only selling one product which is already so popular they decided to create a more memorable domain for it. The page has a clear copy, an appealing image, and a direct link to purchase the book.
If you’re creating a domain for a temporary campaign, however, we recommend disabling that domain. This way you won’t hurt your search rankings by sending people to a non-functional page.
For multiple promotional domains, simply ensure that you properly add them to your sitemap file. Search engines will index and rank them accordingly without penalizing you for any shortcomings.
Brand Protection
You have competitors and potential copycats as a business. This is pretty much inevitable. However, when you acquire domains that are similar or relate to your domain name, you are one step ahead.
Domain squatters usually look out for popular domain names and then purchase different national extensions. When you then need to buy that domain in the future, they hike up the price and resell.
In most cases, to the highest bidder. What this means is that your competitors can also purchase that domain and redirect your traffic to their website. If your competitor also has a similar sounding domain name or website, your customers can easily mistake their site for yours. So you end up spending a lot on marketing with little results.
There’s also the possibility of spelling errors. For example, this marketing agency uses 5minutemarketingmakeover.com as its primary domain. Unfortunately, when you advertise this business, a lot of people might assume that the domain is fiveminutemarketingmakeover.com. This agency understands the potential risk here and purchased both domains. However, the latter automatically redirects users to the primary domain name.
Asides from your competitors, many scammers might try to take advantage of a similar domain to defraud your customers. Especially if you specialize in processing payments and other types of transactions. That’s why we recommend purchasing multiple domain names that are similar to your primary domain.
What Other Types of Domains Should You Purchase?
So you’ve seen the benefits of having multiple domains but you’re not yet sure of a domain you should purchase. This entirely depends on where you are as a business. If you’re a startup, you’d want to start with building your SEO and protecting your brand. As an established business, it might be expanding and better targeting your clients.
In addition to your main brand domain name, here are a couple of domain categories you can explore;
Alternative spellings domain
If your brand is regularly misspelled either due to numbers, multiple letters, or language variations like ‘center’ and ‘centre’, purchase domains that’ll address this common misconception. You can then redirect all the traffic you get from your variations to your primary domain. That way you won’t lose any of your prospective clients to a competition or worse, to a spam site.
Alternative top-level domains
When you can purchase other domain extensions that are different from your core domain. So if you have a .com domain extension, secure other popular domains like.net, .co, or even .org. You can even choose a domain extension that’ll make your business easy to remember. For example, instead of saying cinderelladeepcleaningservice.com, it could be cinderellaservice. clean
Country domain extensions
Like we’ve stated in the perks listed above, during expansion, especially to newer markets, you need to have other country domain extensions. This will help you attract more customers in that region and boost your primary domain. It’ll also help you personalize their experience there as you can use their language and style to communicate more effectively.
The Bottom Line
As a business, multiple domain names come in quite handy when you need to improve your reach, expand and ward off the competition. It also helps you maintain a good reputation by making it harder for scammers to deceive your customer base. So, think about what strategies you’d want to employ next and how multiple domains can help you improve your success rate.
Once you’re set, you’d need a domain name registrar to help you secure these multiple domains. Start by finding the available domains for your business name on domanify. Remember, time matters when getting premium domain names for your business. You don’t want to lose a domain extension to squatters, fraudsters, or your competition.
