Have you Googled your company online lately to see what turns up? Try it just for fun and take a good look at the results. Searching for your name, and your company name, will reveal all of the places on line where you and your company are mentioned…and it will give you a good sense of all the companies and other organizations that share a name that is either similar to, or exactly like, yours. The people with whom you want to do business are not going to search for your company name if they don’t know about you, so this isn’t about how well you’re showing up in a search. But taking an inventory of all the listings you have online will give you a sense of how robust your online presence actually is.

When I first did this exercise some years ago I was confronted with the shocking fact that I am not the only Susan Crossman in the world. I had already learned that there was a real estate agent in California with the same name as me, and she owned what I considered the highly desirable www.susancrossman.com. But there are also other Susan Crossmans in various locations throughout the US and Canada, as well as the UK, South Africa, Australia, Spain and so on. If someone knew my name, but didn’t know much else about me, how would they know they had the right Susan Crossman?

There was also another Crossman Communications in the world and it provided PR services in Australia. And it still does. Fifty years ago, another company that far away would not have any relevance at all to a business established in the Toronto area. But the internet now provides instant access to any business with a website anywhere in the world. Someone searching for your business could find the other guy instead, and not end up completing a sale that would benefit you both.

If I had known in the early days what I know now, I would have purchased www.susancrossman.com (if it were, indeed, available) when I set up my very first website. I do own www.susancrossman.ca and various other extensions (.net, .org, .tv, etc.). But my company had always been called Crossman Communications and it initially didn’t occur to me that I might also want the url that goes with my personal name as well. Those urls are cheap—generally speaking they cost only $10-$15 a year—and well worth the price. Likewise, I have also purchased numerous other extensions for Crossman Communications, in order to protect my brand. The world is shrinking!

I buy all of my urls through www.namecheap.com but there are many other services out there that will facilitate a url purchase such as:

• www.godaddy.com
• www.bluehost.com
• www.domain.com

If you are interested, go to one of those websites and search for and purchase domain names that go with your company name, your own name, or how you do what you do. Buy misspellings of your name as well. If you’re a Canadian company, purchase both the Canadian and American spellings if there is a word in your name that changes when you cross the border. It’s a good idea to also purchase urls that go with what you do, or that people might use when searching for the type of service you provide, e.g. “safewheels.com” or “greattools.com,” etc. You can easily point all traffic that finds you when someone searches for these words back to your website.

If you would like some guidance around your online content, and if you’d like to find out more about how you can make it work more productively for your bottom line, please get in touch!