Choosing a domain name that actually works

The best test for a domain is the phone test: say it out loud once and see whether the other person can type it without asking you to repeat it. Hyphens, double letters and creative spellings all fail that test.

For a Canadian business serving Canadian customers, a .ca signals local and is often still available when the .com is gone. If you sell across borders, try to hold both and point one at the other.

If your first choice is taken, do not add a hyphen. Add a real word instead — a city, a service or a short verb. "pgcleaners.ca" reads better than "pg-cleaners.ca" and is far easier to say.

Register the domain in your own name and keep the login. Whoever controls the domain controls the website and the email, so it should never sit in a contractor's account.

Check availability before you print anything. A live lookup takes seconds and tells you whether the name is registered anywhere in the world.

Short is better than clever, and sayable is better than short. Names that fail in the real world nearly always fail for the same handful of reasons.

• Hyphens: people forget them, and a competitor may own the version without.
• Double letters where two words meet, which read as typos.
• Numbers, because "4" and "four" are two different domains you now have to own.
• Deliberate misspellings, which stop working the moment anyone says the name out loud.
• Words that shorten badly into an email address, which you will type thousands of times.

For a business serving one region, putting the city in the domain helps people recognise you instantly and does no harm in search. The trade-off arrives if you expand: a name tied to one town becomes awkward two towns later. If growth is likely, choose a name that describes what you do and let the pages carry the locations.

Register for several years so an expiry cannot catch you out, turn on auto-renew, and keep the registrar login in the business owner's own account. Add privacy protection to keep your home address off public records. If you can, hold the obvious close variants and point them at the main site rather than letting someone else buy them later.

Check the exact spelling is free across the domain, the social handles you plan to use and the mailbox you want. Then say the finished address out loud to somebody who has never heard it and ask them to type it. If it lands first time, the name is done.

Putting keywords in a domain used to be a shortcut. It is not one now, and a name built purely out of search terms tends to look like an advert rather than a business. Pick a name people can remember and say; earn the rankings with pages that answer real questions. The exception is mild and worth noting: a name containing your trade or town does help people recognise what you do when they see it in a list of search results, and recognition is worth more than any tiny ranking effect.

It is normal to own the .ca and the .com, plus a common misspelling. Only one should be the real site; the others redirect to it. Running the same content on multiple live domains splits your search history and confuses customers about which address is correct. One canonical home, everything else pointing at it.

You will type the address on the phone, read it out in voicemails and print it on invoices. Say the finished email out loud before committing: firstname@ a long, hyphenated domain is painful forever. If the domain works as an email address, it will work everywhere else.

• Can a stranger spell it after hearing it once?
• Is it under about fifteen characters?
• Does it avoid hyphens, numbers and doubled letters?
• Does the matching email address read well?
• Are the social handles you want still free?
• Does it still fit if you expand to another town or service?
• Is it clearly different from an existing local business?

Tick all seven and you have a name you will not resent in five years, which is the only real test a domain has to pass.