What do you do if your perfect domain name is already taken?

You’ve come up with that slightly ironic and amusing business name, the name that easily identifies your business and the name that garners some respect in the industry. You decide to purchase the obvious dream domain name choice, but it’s already been purchased (although not necessarily in use), nightmare, what can you do? Find out from our 3 simple tips for altering the domain name to one that is available.

• Consider different extensions

  A whole plethora of extensions are now available outside of the standard .com and .co.uk. Let’s create a pretend business for today’s example, a business name being Personalised Dog Collars. Unfortunately (and believe it or not) www.personaliseddogcollars.com is already taken. But with the same domain names, .dog, .pet, .co and .info are available to purchase.

• Change the name slightly

  Whilst you don’t want to detract from the business name you’re working with, and SEO benefits that will bring, you could slightly deviate to get a strong domain name with an extension such as .com. In this instance, www.personaliseddoggycollars.com is available.  www.personalisedmuttcollars.com is also available so you could consider changing your business’ name if that interested you.

  Just be careful that you don’t use incorrect spellings, numbers or much other punctuation as this will downgrade your website and make it harder for people to find it.

• Buy the domain name

  If it’s available to buy from the current owner and you think it’s really key then you could consider buying it from the owner. This will be much more expensive than buying an original domain name as powerful domain names are traded like any other valuable good. But if it’s not in use then you may want to weigh up the benefits. This will involve a fair bit of haggling and potentially a bit of a waiting game.

  It’s super easy to purchase your own custom domain name from Webforward. Simply type in the domain you’re looking for into our domain name checker and we’ll bring back all the domains that are available to you. Once you own your domain name the next step will be hosting your website. If you want to find out more now, and how we can help you then give us a shout at hello@webfwd.co.uk