Choosing a domain name for your new local business can be difficult especially nowadays when all the good SEO names have be taken and people start to play around be adding words, hyphen etc, but this can all be avoided by choosing a domain name at the same time you are choosing your business or trading name.

If we where to give our best advice we would say that your domain name should match your business name exactly as this just looks more professional and makes it easier for people who don't know your domain name but do know your business name find you online but if this ship has already sailed you'll need to get something as close as and avoid the mistake listed below

If you can't get the exact domain name then yes you can use a hyphen. Many so called SEO experts, especially the hacks you see on Youtube will say never use a hyphen but we have ranked many domain names that contain a hyphen but as a rule use just one as multiple hyphens in a domain name appears spammy to both Google and visitors which dates back to the early day of Google when their algorithms where less complex and you could rank website simply because the keyword was in your domain name and you saw 1000's of domain names similar to landscape-gardener-manchester.co.uk which you could rank no.1 for "Landscape Gardener Manchester"  without any optimisation or marketing.

Google soon got rid of this poor ranking signal which was around the same time they started ignoring lists of keywords and /or the Keyword META Tag. When Google did away with this it was welcomed by genuine local businesses and professional SEO companies but domain squatters where not happy at all.

Domain squatters where people or companies who used to buy up what they considered premium domain names - domain names containing keywords  and sit (squat) on these domains that they paid a few quid for and offer them to desperate companies for £100's sometimes 1000's of pounds.

The worst of these dubious companies checked companies house too waiting for a company name to be registered and snapping up the relevant domain names. This is why we said that it was important to register your domain name at the same time to set up your business

Back when you could rank simply because your domain name contained a premium keywords these dubious companies cleaned up but after Google got rid of this ranking signal most ceased trading, and good riddance. You still have a few knocking around trying to scam companies but generally this business model has all but died out.

A mistake many people make when registering their domain name is to use the wrong domain suffix. If you are a local business based in the UK then always register a .co.uk domain name. Registering the .com, .net, .org instead will affect your rankings as Google sees you as a Global company and not a local business.

We've actually had local companies and tradesmen with global domain names come to us for marketing and the first thing we tell them is to change their domain name. This is usually met with resistance with the client saying that they have put a lot of work into ranking their domain and believe starting for scratch is the worse possible thing we they could do.

Our answer is always that their domain doesn't rank anyway so they have nothing to lose. This resistance soon goes away one they see their website finally ranking after just a month or so of marketing with the correct domain name suffix.

A question we often get asked is whether or not the length of your domain name affects SEO and the short answer is yes, it does.

When people realise that their domain name has already been registered they start to add words to the domain increasing the amount of characters and  they they'll typically do is add a location to their name and end up with something like  premierdrivewayswarrington.co.uk

As mentioned earlier using an area in the domain name itself (areas in directories and sub domains are fine) can be seen as spammy so you now have the longer than usual domain name with a spammy area added too. This will be difficult if not impossible to rank organically in the modern day.

Some people go a step further to make the longer domain name easier to read by adding multiple hyphens ending up with premier-driveways-warrington.co.uk. Again, this will be difficult if not impossible to rank.

When choosing a domain name for your business you should avoid these mistakes and try to choose a domain name at the same time that you choose a business/trading name.

During our 15 years in the SEO and Marketing industry we have seen first hand the impact a domain name can have on a websites ranking and our advice is that domains names should be under 20 characters,  contain a maximum of one hyphen and should contain your location.