Look For a Top Level Domain (TLD) First (.com)

Your domain name should reflect your business activity and trading name as closely as possible. It should be as short as is practical bearing this in mind. For example fredsbakery. If you operate in just one town you could add that to your domain name too. For instance fredsbakeryleeds. Be careful not to make it too long and complicated as it must be easy to remember.

Adding a location may well retrict you development in the future should you have a business that could operate in different locations

Try a Regional Domain if TLD Unavailable (.co.uk: es etc)

A great alternative if TLD not available is to  use a regional domain which is almost as good such as fredsbakery.co.uk : fredsbaker.us and so on, but make sure that us where you trade to help with local Google ranking. If you are only ever going to trade in UK then a .co.uk should be a prime choice. It will most likely be cheaper too.

Do not necessarily ignore all other domains though they are just not as good when it comes to ranking your website. Work within your requirements and your budget.

Consider Buying Other Offers The Domain Company May Make, Such as Additional Domain Suffixes (.net; . biz etc.) if You Have Local Competitors who Could Use It. This could protect your business from others “piggybacking” your business.

Always Purchase a Minimum of 2 Years

If you buy a domain name for 2 years or more this can help your Google ranking as they take into account the ageing of a domain in their ranking algorithm. Short term purchases throw up a flag that it may be a name used for “Flipping” (sold on at a profit) type domain.

Select Auto-renewal to ensure continuity

All domain names need to be renewed. Forgetting to renew could be a disaster as you could lose the name to someone else or it could be expensive to get it back.

Consider Protecting Ownership Details, Though it Costs Extra

Protecting ownership details means no-one can look up your details online to find out about your online business.

Should You Add SSL? If you collect customers’ names for a mailing list, then you must.

(SSL is a security certificate that you need when dealing with customer data so Search Engines do not mark your site as unsafe).

Google and most serch engines are now favouring domains that have SSL and these appear (e.g. https://fredsbakery.co.uk or https://www.fredsbakery.co.uk) If you do not have an https prefix your visitors may receive an unsafe website warning. This is very bad for business.

We personally do not like this direction but understand why it is being done, to deter online fraud, but as usual it is the innocent who suffer most as it is another cost to the business. If you do not collect addresses you may not need an SSL , but nobody knows how far the search engines will go in implementing this