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Wednesday, 17 December 2008

The Importance Of An Easily Understandable URL

WTF did they say?I've been a massive fan of Webmaster Radio for a couple of years now, there's a few shows that are always entertaining and informative. There's also lots of audio adverts for webmarketing related products - one of which that drives me potty every time I hear it. It's still running which I find amazing as it must be costing money. It's amazing, because until today I still didn't know who the company were, despite the money they've spent advertising themselves on the radio.

Here's the advert - click to listen

Ok, from that, can you quickly find the company involved? Is it Learist, Liris, Learis, Leeris, Lirist, Leirist, etc? You tell me. The URL is not instantly recognisable and easily findable, despite being repeated time and time again. There is no clarity, and just when you think you have a chance to get the company name with a telephone number, they tell you the number is 1-88-GoLearis or whatever you think you heard. The point of paying for advertising is to get people to your site, but if you don't make it easy for them, they won't come. I'd be amazed if a fraction of the people who heard that advertising and were interested in the product ever found their way to the site?

I think it's a great example of how important a domain name can be, especially when it comes to getting people to your brand by word of mouth or audio. I'll put you out of your misery, if you don't already know who the company in the advert are, it's Lyris. I would never have got that from the advert, it was only by chance I spotted the name in an unsubscribe message I got back from an email list I'd just left. After hearing the advert 100s of times, up until now I was still clueless as to who the heck they were! Searching some of the variations I mentioned above was no good, none of them triggered a 'Do you mean: Lyris' message.

Now, I found myself in a similar predicament before - I was speaking about blogging on a BBC radio show and had the chance to promote my personal blog. It's got a funny name, and for me to have got people to get that name I would have had to spell it out, which frankly isn't a great way of promoting it. Rather than do that, I didn't mention it at all. Now, if I was a bit more prepared I would have gone out and registered something understandable as a domain and pointed it to the actual blog. I'd have gone for something that rolled of the tongue as was easy to spell. BlogDavid.com, blogofdavid.com, myfunblog.com - any would have been better than spelling out the actual domain.

Lyris could have done something similar I feel for this long running advert, they could have gone for ppctoolset.com, marketingtoolset.com, holisticoverview.com, etc. Any of these would have worked better than the actual lyris.com that's used in the advert. Sure they could have used the name over and over, but then gone on and said something like 'find out more about Lyris' services at marketingtoolset.com, and boff, there you go, instant find.

There are plenty of examples out there of poorly thought out domain names and their lack of understandability. The whole web 2.0 movement seems to have made ill thought out domains a trait all of its own, something I've written about elsewhere. For instance, if I told you to go to cool school dot com, how many of you would end up at Qoolsqool.com?

Before you go and do something with a domain name you want to be spread by word of mouth (or on radio), stop and have a think. Speak to a few people first, tell them the name and see if they can go find it. If you have to spell the domain name to them, consider it a fail. I'm a great believer in KISS - Keep It Simple Smackhead, and that's something I believe you should also do when it comes to URLs, at least if you want to be found.

Posted by Dio Bach at 09:13 | 1 comments | links to this post