Five Advantages of Buying Multiple Domain Names for Your Business

The rules of domain names have always seemed simple:

One domain for one business.

This is hardly a fast rule, but many business owners follow it anyway. They believe that having several domain names could confuse visitors. However, that isn’t the case. Having multiple domain names is not only possible – you can buy as many domains as you like – but it can also deliver some interesting benefits to your business.

Why Get Multiple Domains?

Perhaps the biggest argument against having multiple domain names is that each one you buy costs money, both upfront and in terms of maintaining the domain. Forbes estimates that cost to be between $10 and $20 per domain, per year. As such, the benefits of having multiple domains need to outweigh the costs associated with them.

Here are five of those benefits.

Benefit 1 – Reduce Competition From Companies With Similar Names

Let’s assume that your company already owns the domain for buycomputers.com.

That’s a powerful domain, but there are many others that a competitor could buy that emulate your company’s branding, only with a different domain extension at the end. For instance, buycomputers.co or buycomputers.shop – the latter being useful for ecommerce stores – could be registered by an independent entity. They may then charge a substantial amount for you to buy that domain from them.

So, get in ahead of those entities.

Buying multiple domains, especially if you have a recognizable brand name, is a protective measure that ensures anybody who searches for your brand winds up on your website.

Benefit 2 – You Can Create Domains for Different Promotional Strategies

Your business may run promotional strategies at various points during the year. For example, an ecommerce store might run a Black Friday deal every November, along with offering coupons or discounted items that it wants to keep separate from its main website.

Multiple domains allow you to create that separation by giving you a domain you can use solely for your promotional campaigns.

The rise of new gTLDs – domain extensions that go beyond the standard .coms of the world – makes it possible to create promotion-specific domains. The .blackfriday extension is a good example. Purchase it for your business and you have a domain name that you can use every November.

Benefit 3 – A Positive Impact on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are two ways that owning multiple domains helps with SEO.

First, the branding benefits. If your company’s name is a keyword – or a recognizable brand – then buying multiple domains using that name allows you to essentially “flood” search engines with your website. Whenever somebody types your name, they’re likely to see your main company website, followed by the various offshoots that all use the same domain name with a different extension.

Second, you can also use multiple domains to target specific keywords. If your current domain name doesn’t include a keyword that a user would likely search for, you can create new domains that incorporate that keyword. That can come either in the domain name itself or the extension used.

Benefit 4 – Funneling Traffic to Your Main Website

The domains you buy don’t have to be populated with websites. In fact, many buy several domains before setting up 301 redirects, which sends anybody who lands on one of the additional domains to their main website.

Why?

This strategy allows those business owners to capture people who may have used the incorrect spelling by sending them to the site they wanted to reach rather than delivering a 404 page. Think of it as a user experience improvement – you use subdomains and misspelled domains to ensure your prospects reach your website.

Benefit 5 – You Can Take Advantage of New gTLDs

Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) have been around for as long as the internet has been available to the public. You’ve seen the most common many times, such as .com and .org, but these are no longer the only gTLDs available to business owners.

Today, you can take advantage of thousands of others that provide a clearer picture of what your website offers. The previously mentioned .blackfriday gTLD is a good example – it instantly tells somebody that your website is related to Black Friday offers.

Other businesses use gTLDs to segment their offering based on product categories, essentially letting them serve up niche-specific sites based on what their clients need.

Go Forth and Multiply

Having multiple domains delivers a host of marketing and branding opportunities to your business. It enables you to segment your website based on the offers you’re making – as well as target people who’ve misspelled your name – all while ensuring you rank well in search engines.

Plus, buying multiple domain names based on extensions is a handy protective measure that prevents you from being extorted for money in the future.

With Register.Domains, you can purchase domain names – along with choosing from over 1,000 gTLDs – with each domain coming with free email forwarding, domain name servers, and website redirection as standard.