The latest proof of just how important the right domain name is for businesses has been delivered by Toys R Us, whose deep pockets are now an impressive $5.1million lighter after purchasing the domain toys.com at auction.
It’s an extraordinary amount of money, and it’s not as if Toys R Us doesn’t have its company name as domain names, so why in these times when every other news item seems to be suggesting an economic slide of previously unheard of proportions (and as someone who has just read the post-war diaries of an ordinary housewife, I really do hope we’ve a way to go before we’re all scraping around to that degree!), has the global toy retailer raided the piggy banks to such an impressive degree for a domain that probably only cost a few dollars to register originally?
Well, not being privy to their marketing decisions, I can only make an educated guess, but here, in no particular order, are a few very possible reasons:
To grab casual toy hunters
Toys.com is a ‘go to’ sort of domain, the obvious thing to try if you’re in the market and aren’t inclined to search. It may sound daft, but just as there are a huge number of people who Google for full domain names rather than typing them into their address bar, there are a fair few who type likely-looking domains into the address bar in hopes they’ll end up at somewhere that looks about right.
Memorability.
The shorter, snappier and more relevant your domain the greater the chances of people actually remembering it and typing it in correctly. When you advertise, whether it’s pay-per-click, a multi-million pound tv campaign, or just on your business cards, you want the URL you quote to be something that will stick in people’s minds if they need your services or products, not something that’s awkward to spell, overly long or includes five hyphens. A four letter .com domain that’s completely business-relevant and forms a commonly-used word? Gold dust.
Good old SEO.
One of the first things a Search Engine Optimisation expert will tell you is that it makes a huge difference if your domain name is relevant to both you and your business and what you’re talking about on the page. Having toys.com is a great head start for an online toy retailer – it’s as prime a piece of online real estate as an Oxford Street storefront is offline. But you can apply the same thinking to your own brand domain name and to deeper links, too. For example, all of our URLs include our company name and the product name – like www.daily.co.uk/products/web-hosting. There’s no long, unwieldy strings of gobbledegook here, just a really clear indication to search engines and potential customers alike of who we are and what they can expect to find on that page. And the clearer you make it to both bots and bods, the better you’ll rank in both their eyes. The same is true of blogging, – take a look at the permalink for this post and you’ll see it’s the post title, and that that title reflects the post content. This is far better from an SEO perspective than a page or article number and should be easy to change within your blogging platform.
The oxygen of publicity
Last but by no means least, not only does the company have the perfect domain for its business but now it has a ton of extra publicity because here we all are in blogland talking about it. It’s even made the BBC. That’s a lot of people who now have the right domain (from the Toys R Us perspective) in mind for the next time a toy-related present buying opportunity presents itself. While all of the above are sound business reasons for acquiring the domain and most probably influenced the decision more heavily, I can’t help wondering if all the extra PR has done more to make the purchase worthwhile than any of them.
For more detail on the story, visit the BBC News website.
