Local business owners tip for ranking high in the search engines.

Choosing the right name for your business is something that should require a good bit of though. Most local companies either use their family name, or a made up name that has some sentimental meaning to them, but it is a good idea to think about your marketing before you choose a business name.

If you have a business such as a roofing company in Tampa the ideal name for your business would be Tampa Roofing. The reason for this is that many of your customers are going to be searching for your service on the internet and having an exact match domain name will make your website rank better than your competitors who have business or domain names that do not contain the words "Tampa Roofing"

You will see in the video below just how important it can be to get the EXACT match domain name in either .com, ,net, or .org. All three of these domain extensions rank highly and require less link building to compete for the term Tampa Roofing.

If you are in a big city like Tampa, there is a good chance all these domain names are already taken, but often in smaller towns, you can snag the .net or .org domains and build your local business website there. You can go to domain companies like GoDaddy to check to see if they are available.

If they are taken, check the WhoIs data to see who owns the domain and see if you can buy it from them. Many times people who know these domains are valuable to business owners will buy them and put a directory of roofers on the site and get paid commission when people click on the ads. If it is not making them a lot of money, they may be willing to sell the site to you for a few hundred bucks.

This would be a good investment for any business who wants their site to rank high with little effort.

The alternative is to build a mass of links to your site that outweighs the authority of the exact domain name. You may need a few hundred links to compete, or at least a good number of quality links from the right sources.

If you cannot find the exact domain name, the next best thing would be to have the keywords in the name with as few additional characters as possible. eg, mytamparoofing.com or tampa-roofing.com

I hope this helps local business owners choose the right domain name for their company. Of course, you can be called ABC Roofers, but have the domain name TampaRoofing.com.

Fact: 98% of local business searches will click on a link on the first page of the search results. If you are not there, you are missing all the potential customers.