How do I choose a name for my business? Part 1
Ready to start a business? Yes? Good, then lets do the first step in getting that done – giving your business a name.
It may not seem that important, but it sets you on a path, gives some solidity to that vague idea you’ve had. It essentially gives your fledgling business life.
‘But it’s easy’, ‘I hear you say, I just choose a name I like and off I go, right?’ Well, you can do that, but you’ll probably find that later down the line you’ll be wishing you’d put a little more thought into it. This is especially true if you want to rely on your website to bring business to your door.
We put a lot of thought into finding the right name, so I’ll just go through what we did. If you follow the same path, you shouldn’t go far wrong. And remember, this is not something to be done quickly, it takes time and patience. Unless you are struck with inspiration, in which case it probably will be pretty quick.
While going through the process, we used the main search engines to look for the names we were thinking of. This was to see how many results it threw at us, and to have a quick look to see what the other websites were about.
Something else you may want to think about is how much traffic do you want coming to your site? By that I mean how much business can you handle? We, for instance, are using our site as an online portfolio, we only want to do this part time, it’s a way for us to make enough to live on and allow us the free time to do other things we love. However, as our business is designing SEO optimised websites, and this is our portfolio, we’ve used lots of SEO techniques in the build and the content of this site.
Of course, building SEO into the site and creating SEO optimised content isn’t the only way to create traffic. If you want to generate loads of visitors to your site, you’ll also have to think about paid for advertising too.
Right, let’s get on with it.
We decided that there were five ways we could use to come up with our business name, we could choose:
1 – something that just describes what we do
for example MS Website Design, don’t really need to explain that one. But you can see an issue here straightaway, you will be competing with some very big, well established names in the business who will likely be using those keywords already. It may take lots of money thrown at PPC (Google pay per click advertising) or time spent promoting your business on social media to be seen.
2 – something that describes where we are as well as what we do
Derbyshire Design, for example, might work if we just wanted local business, but may not work so well for national or international business. Unless, (there’s always an unless) you’re selling something that is local to the area and well-known for it, like Derbyshire oatcakes. We aren’t, we want to be able to move ourselves and the business with us and we work remotely so can be international too. We decided against doing this.
3 – a name that meant something to us, and was real too
like Lightwood Stroll. We liked this idea, and played around with several names generated this way. But nothing came up that really floated our boats, so we moved on.
4 – two or more random words in combination
could have used anything really, Guitar Panthers, Browns Bunions, Whimpering Typhoon Bongo…you get the picture. I would have liked to have said unique combination here, but if you know anything about Googlewhack you’ll realise how hard that really is. Again, we toyed with a few combinations, but nothing stood out.
5 – made up words
some of the most well known businesses in the world use made up names, Google for example. Granted this was a misspelling of Googol, as in the mathematical term Googolplex, but still, Google itself is meaningless. So, we thought, if it’s good enough for them it’s definitely good enough for us. But, we also wanted a word that was made up of things that meant something to us, but wasn’t actually a word, if you see what I mean. So we started smooshing words together and eventually we came up with skoobaroob – no, I am not telling you what it means, but I imagine you think we like scuba and rhubarb.
So, now you know a little about how we came up with our name. But the quest didn’t end there, there are lots of other things you need to think about, which we’ll cover in the next three, yes, I said three, instalments.
