Protect your Business and Brand by Registering Multiple Domain Names

By Rakesh Packer

Promoting your brand name is often an important aspect of any business’’s success. However when it comes to the internet, businesses often only register a single domain name, without considering their geographical targets. Most businesses often feel incredibly fortunate to have gained their preferred dot com domain and stop searching further for important alternatives that could offer them a safeguard on their online brand identity. By failing to capitalise on opportunities to register variations or multiple extensions of their domain names, many competitors are seizing the opportunity to gain traffic from competitors or to damage their brand image.

A number of risks can often arise when competitors decided to use domain names similar to yours in order to display their own services, products, or use the domain in away to negatively affect your brands long built reputation.

There are a number of risks connected with registering only a single domain name:

1. Competitive vulnerability: A competitor creates a website using exactly the same domain name as yours with a different extension (e.g. they use .org instead of .co.uk) in order to tempt your customers away.

2. Cyber squatting: To register a domain name in order to try and sell it for an inflated fee. This is a key problem facing a large number of businesses on the Internet.

3. Traffic funnelling: When someone creates websites with variations of your domain name or they register a site with slight mis-spellings of your domain to draw traffic from people that may accidentally mistype your domain name.

4. Disgruntled websites: These websites are often set up when an unhappy customer, or angry ex-employee, registers a similar domain name to yours with the single purpose of posting significant and inaccurate information about you or your business.

So, why should businesses register more than a single domain name?

It’’s a sensible approach to register numerous variations of your domain name, and it offers a number of added benefits alongside protecting your brand. Using multiple domain names allows you to build your business further and create a dynamic online identity. Registering a number of domains can help you to:

1. Stop competitors from drawing traffic to their site by using similar domain names to yours.

2. Promote a number of other products separately across a number of interlinked sites.

3. Create other windows to drive traffic to your website.

4. Utilise domains to create specific advertisement campaigns for target markets.

5. Take charge variations in your domain name and bring through added traffic

6. Reduce the risk of an attack on your online brand identity.

About The Author

Rakesh Packer is a consultant for a domain names registration company in the UK.