Vanity URLs - Expanding your brand
Are you looking to expand your brand, or have you got a new product or service that you want to promote online. Having your business URL on your marketing materials is a start. However, how about using vanity URLs.
A vanity URL (or vanity domain) is an easy-to-remember URL that is often used to promote a particular product or service.
For example, your company URL may be www.company.com, and your vanity URL for a product XYZ could be www.xyz.com. Often, a vanity URL redirects to a page on your site. For example, www.xyz.com could redirect to www.compnay.com/xyz.html.
This accomplishes three things:
- Firstly, you’ll send prospects to the most appropriate landing page. Sending customers to your home page and making them search for what thay want could cost you the sale.
- Secondly, because a redirect is not a seperate site, you’ll likely avoid additional site hosting fees. It just allows people to type in one URl and then be sent to another. This can be set up by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). You could pay a small hosting fee for the redirect, this shouldn’t be too much and will be less than hosting a seperate site.
- Finally, any links that end up pointing to your vanity URL will count towards the link equity of the company site. If these were two sites the link equity for each site would be seperate.
You do not need to use vanity URLs, but they make great low-cost web marketing tools.
What not to use as a vanity URL
- xyz.com/someone_elses_trademark - Don’t use Vanity URLs or redirects that are trademarked products or services of another company.
- xyz.com/offensiveword - Perhaps stating the obvious, but not one to remember.
- xyz.com/easy_to_misspell - Consider avoiding words that are hard to spell, or frequently misspelled. Be careful when using anything with the letter “l” or the number “1″ grouped together. Same goes for “u” and “v.”
- xyz.com/&*odd_characters$% - Never use special characters. Avoid using capital letters. Also avoid dashes (-) or underlines (_); they are harder for customers to read and remember.
