Any business large or small needs to protect its online position. This article explores which additional domain names you need to purchase to protect your brand.
It’s important not to get carried away buying every domain variation for your brand name as it could easily start costing a lot of money.
To help decide which domain to purchase I ask if the URL is:
- a common misspelling
- a subdomain misspelling
- a common TLD alternative
- protecting users from scams
- protecting homeless brands
Common misspellings
You should purchase the common misspellings for your brand. For example the delivery company FedEx often gets misspelt as Fedx.
- Fedex.com (live website)
- Fedx.com (common misspelling)
You can check how people search for your brand within the Google Search Console. This will give you an indication of search volume. You should use data to help decide which spelling variations to purchase. For example the data would probably indicate purchasing ‘Fidex.com’ isn’t worth the cost for the volume of searches.
Once you purchased your domain, I would recommend redirecting the domain to your main website as a 301 redirect. This is especially important if you advertise your URL in print, TV or radio where the user has to manually type the address – potentially leading to a misspelling.
Subdomain misspellings
Many companies use subdomains such as ASDA’s grocery website groceries.asda.com.
For subdomains which are customer facing you should buy variations without the ‘.’ For example ASDA should purchase groceriesasda.com.
Scam protection
Trying to decide which domains to buy to protect against scams is probably the hardest due to the potential variety.
You have to balance the likelihood vs cost.
Scammers may use similar urls to your main website. For example chester2oo.co.uk looks very like the legitimate url chesterzoo.co.uk. You need to think which letters in your url could look the same as numbers.
Punycode attacks
Punycode is a system for converting words that can’t be written in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), such as Ancient Greek.
For example you can register a domain name such xn--rolx-dpa.com and this would display as roléx.com in the browser. It looks very similar to the legitimate site rolex.com.
You can try for yourself at Irongeek punycode attack generator.
Common TLD alternative
There are almost 1,500 TLD (Top Level Domains). There is one for .com, another for .gov and so on.
You should only buy common TLD alternatives, in the country you trade.
You shouldn’t buy every TLD alternative such as .design, .info or .io – it will be too costly with little benefit.
Recommended TLD domains to purchase in order of priority:
- country specific TLD. For example trading in UK you should purchase .co.uk and .uk
- .com
- .net
- .org
I would also advise not to buy common misspellings for TLD alternatives. For example Fedex shouldn’t buy fedx.net, fedx.org and so on. Only buy TLD alternatives for your live site.
Homeless brands
Your company might have a brand name which is well known but doesn’t have a website.
For example George is a fashion brand for ASDA supermarkets. They don’t have a website for the brand but heavily promote it.
ASDA have purchased george.com which redirects to their main website. Owning george.com gives them the option to either sell the brand or expand its presence. It also stops domain squatters charging a fortune to buy the domain.
Summary
There is no right or wrong strategy. The key is to have some rules over which domains you buy so you don’t end up spending too much. Personally I would always focus on common misspellings as you get the benefit of protecting against scams but also helping users who mistyped your URL into their browser.
