How To Find An Available Domain?

When it comes to hosting a website online, you need two things, the first is a host (where to have your website) and the second is a domain. Finding a host is easy and there are numerous options available online. The domain can be a little more challenging.

Why Is It So Hard To Find An Available Domain?

There are two main reasons why it is hard to find an available domain. The first is that you will need to have the domain related to your store. This could be its name, products, services or activities.

Another problem is that there are more than 840 million registered domains online and 99.9% of the English dictionary is thought to be a registered domain. Therefore, you need to be original.

Plus, you need to ensure your domain name is:

• easy to type – the longer it is, the more typos that can be made, resulting in potential customers not going to your website.
• be memorable – so audiences can remember the actual web address after seeing it on marketing (online, TV, magazine, etc.)
• unique – using a similar name to a competitor can cause several issues.

Step-By-Step Guide Guide To Finding An Available Domain

This quick guide will show how you can find an available domain for free and with ease. It will also give you guidance on what is a suitable domain for your business.

Step 1 – Access A Domain Search Tool

The first step you need to do is to gain access to a domain search tool. Our one at Gochyu is free and easy to use. The Check Domain Availability Tool only needs you to enter the domain you’re looking to test and it will find out if it is available.

Step 2 – Get A List Of All Potential Domains

The next step is to collect all the potential domains you have. This can be a long list, or it can be short. You should have collected all the potential domain names when you created a brand name. If not, think about your brand name and how it can be changed into a domain.

Step 3 – Enter All Potential Domains Into The Check Domain Availability Tool

Next you need to enter in the all the potential names into the tool. If one of them is available, you might want to go ahead and buy the domain. If none are available, then you might need to think about how you can come up with a more unique domain name that differentiates you but retains your branding.

Step 4 – Check For Variances Of Your Domain Choices

If you do have a couple of good domain choices, you might want to check for similar domains that you didn’t want to use. A good example, if you’re setting up a plumbing company across the US and wanted plumbing-services-in-USA.com then you might want to check variances of this. For instance, plumbingservicesusa.com, plumbingusa.com, usaplumbing.com, usaplumbingservices.com are all taken and customers could potentially confuse all the domains, especially if they’re using search or if they’re in a rush.

Therefore, you might need to think outside the box.

What If Your Domain Name Choices Aren’t Available?

If you can’t find any available domain name choices then you need to think about changing your domain strategy. There are two good examples of how this works.

The first is Tesla. They didn’t originally own the Tesla.com domain name. They bought it for $11 million in 2016. Before this, if you were to search for ‘Tesla Cars’, you were taken to teslamotors.com. This strategy worked for a long time for them and helped them to become successful. However, Tesla became so popular that the other domain was being used too much, Tesla decided to buy the premium name and redirect all traffic there.

Another example is the UK company B&Q who offer customers a chance to do regular household projects themselves. As a result they have their main domain as diy.com short for do it yourself. They do also own the bandq.com domain, but this redirects here.

Both these examples showcase how you can buy and use a domain that is not your name but is instead related to your business.

A good example of this would be if someone owned a convenience store in New York that was called Joe’s Store. The domain, joesstore.com is taken but convenience-new-york.com is not (at time of writing).

The latter domain is suitable because it describes what the business is, a convenience store, and where it is, New York. There is is also an additional benefit as people typing in Convenience Stores, New York or Convenience store near me, will be shown this domain as it has the keywords inside the domain.

How To Create A Unique Domain Name?

There are several ways that you can create a unique domain name for your brand. Here are a couple of suggestions for you.

Abbreviating Your Name

The first thing you could try is to use abbreviations of your name. There are two reasons why this might be a good option anyway:

1. When your name is very long.
2. When your name has a lot of potential to be misspelt.

A classic example of this would the Internet Movie Database. This is a rather long name and there is a lot of potential for a typos. The company does own the internetmoviedatabase.com domain, but it redirects to imdb.com.

​​​​​​​Using Your Services

Another way to come up with a unique and interesting domain name is to think about your services. Do you offer something that others don’t? If you’re a local business, this can be fairly easy. All you need to do is use a domain name generator and three keywords.

Then you can head over to the Gochyu Domain name generator. With the three keywords, you can have numerous domain names created for your website.

If you’re a local business have at least two which relate to your services and one related to the location. This can be really useful because it can help you have a great domain with local SEO potential.

Once you’ve used the Domain Name Generator, you can enter in the domain names you like into the Domain Availability Checker to ensure that they’re available.

​​​​​​​Create A Connection

One of the reasons why Amazon got its name is because the founder liked the idea of his new eCommerce store being compared to the biggest river. The initial tag line for the store was ‘Earth’s biggest book store’. In addition, Amazon has both A to Z in it, which Jeff Bezos liked because it could imply that they stock everything from A to Z (hence the arrow between the letters in the logo).

Google got its name when a graduate student, Sean Anderson, suggested the name Googolplex to the founders of the search engine. Larry Page liked the idea, but wanted it shortened to Googol. This is the number that is followed by 100 zeros.

When Anderson went to check if it was registered, he made a typo to Google but Page liked it so much he decided to register the domain name himself.

The connection for Google is clear. They do list Googols of websites on their search engine and creating a new name for it refers to how they transformed the search engine market.

And you could do the same. Make a connection between an object or a word and then turn that into your domain name.

​​​​​​​Final Word

When you want to find an available domain, you might be lucky and have your business name available. However, you might also need to be creative and find a way to adjust your domain strategy. Being creative is sometimes a great option, many big brands have domain names that aren’t directly saying what they do (Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.). If they can make it work, so can you.