Why You Should Buy Variations Of Your Domain Name

When you first set up your website, you will have had to purchase a domain name for it so that your visitors knew what URL to type into their browser’s address bar in order to access it.

Domain names make it extremely easy to access a website, so, for example, if you wanted to access the Google website you would type in http://www.google.co.uk instead of a hard-to-remember sequence of numbers known as an IP address (i.e. http://173.194.41.127).

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But despite telling people what the domain name of your website is, you will always have a number of people that misspell it.

When this happens, one of two things will occur as a result; they will either get a message in their web browser saying that the website does not exist, or they might end up at someone else’s website instead of yours! This can end up being a potentially bad position to be in, especially if the misspelt website is actually a competitor!

Common spelling mistakes

Let’s say for argument’s sake that you owned the google.co.uk domain name. Some people might end up typing goggle.co.uk, which might be a website that sold swimming goggles.

Now seeing as your website is a search engine, the person who misspelt your domain name will by now be scratching their head and wondering why they are looking at swimming goggles instead of a box to type in a search query!

Here’s another common domain name spelling mistake. Let’s say that your visitor typed in google.com instead of google.co.uk. As you can see the first part of the domain name is correct, but because they thought you had a .com instead of a .co.uk domain name, they have now ended up in a similarly-named and competitor search engine!

The need for purchasing domain name variations

Obviously these are just fictitious examples (although Google is definitely a search engine!) but it illustrates some of the most common spelling mistakes your website visitors can make.

You might think that buying variations of domain names can be quite a complicated and costly affair, but it can pay dividends in the long term because you have a better chance of capturing those visits instead of them going off to somewhere else!

Most hosting control panels, such as cPanel, can be easily configured to allow several ‘parked’ domains to point to one particular website; in other words, if a visitor types in a misspelt domain name (which you own), they will automatically be redirected to the correct one.

Which domains should I purchase?

If you look through your website’s visitor statistics, you can often find out what keywords visitors type into a search engine to eventually reach you. Should you come across a significant proportion of visitors typing in a certain misspelling of your domain name or company name, it would be beneficial for you to buy the domain if it is available and have it point to your website.

For websites that target UK visitors only, it is always a good idea to purchase all of the usual domain endings such as .co.uk, .com, .org and .net. Domain names are fairly inexpensive, but obviously if you are looking to buy hundreds of domain names to protect your brand identity then you could end up paying a lot of money come renewal time!