How do I choose a domain name?
The short answer
Pick your business name if it is available, keep it short and sayable, and stop optimising. Domain choice matters far less than people assume — it is not a ranking factor worth chasing, and the hours spent hunting for a keyword-stuffed alternative are hours not spent on things that do decide whether you get found. Register it in your business's name, today.
On this page
Start with your business name
If yourbusiness.com is free, take it and stop reading. That is the right answer for the overwhelming majority of businesses, and the time you would spend improving on it is worth more spent elsewhere.
The reason is that a domain's job is to be remembered and typed, not to be clever. Somebody hears your name in a conversation, or sees it on a sign, and later tries to find you. Every degree of separation between what they heard and what they must type is a person who ends up on a search results page — or on a competitor.
Five rules that actually matter
Short. Fewer characters is fewer chances to mistype. Two or three words maximum.
Sayable. Test it out loud, on the phone, to somebody who has not seen it written. If you have to spell it, or say "no, with a K", it is the wrong domain. This test catches more bad domains than any other.
No hyphens or numbers. Nobody says "hyphen" out loud, and numbers create an immediate ambiguity — is it "4" or "four". Both guarantee you will be spelling your domain out for the rest of the business's life.
No unusual spellings. Deliberately misspelled words look distinctive on paper and cost you every time somebody types the correct spelling and lands nowhere.
Not too narrow. beirutwedding-cakes.com is a problem the day you start doing birthdays. Name the business, not this year's product line.
Keyword domains stopped working
There was a period when cheapplumberlondon.com had a genuine ranking advantage. That has not been true for years — the exact-match domain signal was deliberately reduced because it was being gamed, and it now does close to nothing.
What it does do is make you look like an SEO exercise rather than a business, which costs you trust with the human being reading it. A real business name outperforms a keyword string on the thing that actually matters, which is whether somebody believes you exist.
If you want to rank for "plumber in [city]", the route is a page that answers that, a complete Google Business Profile and some reviews — not a domain. See what is local SEO.
.com or a country domain?
Both work, and this decision is smaller than it feels.
.com is the safe default. Universally understood, and nobody hesitates over it.
A country domain (.co.uk, .com.lb, .ae) is a good signal if you serve one country and only one country. It says local, which for a local business is an advantage rather than a limitation.
Neither decides your ranking. If you are choosing between them for a Lebanese business specifically, the fuller argument is in .lb domain or .com.
If you can, buy both and redirect one to the other. It is cheap, and it stops somebody else registering the near-miss version of your name later.
The decision that costs money to reverse
Everything above is preference. This one is not: the domain must be registered to your business, with your email as the registrant contact.
Not your developer's account. Not the agency's. Not the personal email of whoever set it up in 2019 and has since left.
A supplier managing your DNS is normal and fine. A supplier being the registrant is not, and the difference only becomes visible on the day you want to leave — which is exactly the wrong moment to discover it. Getting it back is possible and it is a bad month. See someone else controls my domain.
Ask before anyone buys it, and get the confirmation in writing. Helm registers it in the client's business name as standard, which is less a feature than the only version of this arrangement that survives a parting of ways.
Two practical things while you are there
Turn on auto-renew, with a card that will not expire first. The most common way a business loses its domain is not a dispute — it is a renewal notice sent to an inbox nobody opens.
Use a role-based email as the contact — [email protected] rather than one person's address — so it survives that person leaving.
The short version
Take your business name if you can get it. Say it out loud before you buy it. Skip hyphens, numbers and clever spellings. Do not chase keywords, because that stopped working and it makes you look like a campaign rather than a company. Then register it in your own business's name with auto-renew on — because that is the only part of this decision that is expensive to undo.