Securing your brand online is vital for any company, whether you have a website or not. One of the best ways to do this is with domain names.
What are the risks of not having multiple domain names?
In most cases, a business or organisation will pick up one domain name, i.e. mycompany.co.uk. While this does the job intended and allows you to create professional business e-mail accounts, you are still leaving a plethora of domain names with your brand unregistered and susceptible to being picked up by other internet users. These means other people have a chance to use your brand name and create business for themselves and become potential competition for your organisation.
What do I need to do?
For this reason, it’s worth considering picking up multiple domain names for your brand. As of April 2015, ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) reported there to be 900 different TLDs in the root zone in total – this means there are over 900 different options for each name. For example, mycompany.co.uk, mycompany.com, mycompany.org, mycompany.info and hundreds more. It is very unlikely you would want every single one of these extensions – each domain has a specific market and you will not always need to reach out to these.
You will want to identify what your market is, and pick up the domains associated with that. If you are a UK business using a .co.uk domain name, it would be a good idea to also pick up the .UK version as well as the .com domain to secure your brand.
Seek professional, impartial, free advice from Cosmic
There are many different options as outlined above, and Cosmic are here to assist you in making the right decisions when it comes to what domain name(s) your business or organisation should be using.
For any queries, please drop Jamie an e-mail on jamie@cosmic.org.uk or give us a call on 0845 094 6108.