Naming your blog is one of those “Critical Components” of a blog. In fact, I believe this is so important, this entire post is going to focus on it alone.

For those businesses who have an established name and/or brand, you need to consider using that name and/or brand as the name of your blog. However, there are exceptions. For a business selling a product, usually the name of your business has something in it to indicate the product you are selling. If it doesn’t, you need to make sure you put that product name in your blog’s name. The product you are selling is the same keyword or search terms people are going to find you by on the internet when they are looking for your product.

Questions to ask if you are a business selling a product:

• If you are a business selling a product, is your business name too broad?
• Does it encompass all of the items you are selling?
• If that is the case, do you want to focus your blog on a particular niche or product?

Focusing your blog on a more narrow niche or product will in fact get you a more focused audience. You can concentrate your efforts on that one product or niche. If that is your goal, name your blog accordingly.

Naming your blog if you are a service firm

Where we usually run into problems or issues with the naming of a blog is when we are dealing with a service firm. Those firms who are usually named after a group of partners or one particular person. Law firms for example.

Most service firms are of the opinion they should name their blog and optimize it with their firm’s name. My quick answer to them is no. You can certainly include the firm name in the blog and as a keyword for search results. And you should include it in the banner. But it should not be the name of the blog. Why? Quite frankly, those individuals searching on the internet for an answer to their questions or a solution to their problems don’t care about the name of the firm or the owner of the firm. They care about 3 key points.

The 3 key points they should consider are:

1. Where am I located? Chances are, you are going to be targeting a geographical location such as a state or even a metro area. If that is the case, use that location in your name as one of the first parts. When I was picking a name for my law practice blog, I decided to use Kansas as the first part of my blogs name. I wanted my blog to come up on searches when people were searching for issues in Kansas.
2. What do I do? Don’t overlook the importance of telling your target audience what you do. When people are searching in your niche or target they are usually looking for a solution to a problem or issue. If you tell them in the title of your blog what you do, it will move you up in their search results. Once again, I take you to the naming of my law practice blog. FIrst we had Kansas in the name and second, Family & Divorce. So, I told them I worked with “Family & Divorce” in Kansas.
3. Who am I? Finally, you need to tell your niche or target who you are. For example, are you a CPA, Tax Accountant, Lawyer, Copyrighter, Virtual assistant, etc. Than tell them in your title. Once again, I take you to the law practice blog I used to market my services. First we had Kansas, than Family & Divorce and last but not least, Lawyer. So, the title to my blog was Kansas Family & Divorce Lawyer. And it was that title, which we optimized in tags and title tags which helped a lot in getting me some great SEO.

Domain Name

The same consideration should go into picking your domain name. Use the same 3 key points in picking a domain name for your blog. We will discuss this “critical component” in a future post.

Homework:

Your homework is to take some time and write down different ideas you have for names of your blog. Use the 3 key points above when you are doing this. Next, take those same 3 key points, visit GoDaddy or some other domain registering service and find some domains. Domains are cheap, buy some to protect your brand. And do buy a domain that matches your business name. We will discuss how to use that domain in the future also.

One last point on buying domains. If you can not get the .com name, don’t buy the .net name. If you use the .net name, you are going to be sending most of your traffic to the blogging who was able to obtain the .com. Keep looking and writing down domain ideas until you can get a .com name. People are programed to use .com and they will type that into their browser address bar. Do yourself a favor, get the .com!!

We will also discuss using Keyword research to determine what you should call your blog in a future post here too.