The Domain

Coming up with the domain name for a new venture is always a harrowing prospect. You can spend months finding the perfect domain, and still end up with crap. My goals for a domain name for this project were (in order of priority):

1. Supported SEO.
2. Easy to remember.
3. Easy to type/spell.

I hate SEO as much as the next guy, but getting it right is going to be key to the success of this site. I want to make sure I find a domain name that helps in that effort. Also, like any new site, I want the name to be easy to remember and spell. Especially as this site gets off the ground, and Google isn't yet bringing the traffic I'm looking for, it's going to be important for users to keep this site in the back of their heads for the next time they need to make an international call. Down the road though, I'd expect 98% of traffic to come from Google.

Support SEO

I did some quick research to determine how much the domain name itself helps or hurts SEO efforts. Initially, I thought that it was very useful to have hyphen separated words in your domain to help Google break out the words in your domain. It turns out that this is a myth. In the end, the most important SEO that a domain name can give you is making it easy to remember, link to, spell, and brand. Unfortunately in the process, I registered a few hyphenated domain names (that I hope I can still use for something):

• how-to-call-international.com
• how-to-dial-internationally.com

Easy to remember + Easy to type/spell

My core user story revolves around a user wanting to make an international call, loading up Google.com, and searching for something like "how to dial internationally" or "how to call australia from usa". This tells me I need to have a domain name that directly associates with these concepts. To help determine what people search most often when thinking about this kind of need, I used Google AdWords Keyword Tool. I got the following:


This tells me what the most common Google searches are in this general area. This will help me most when optimizing the SEO approach later on, but for now I'm going to use this to come up with a memorable and easy to type/spell domain name.

After playing around with various ideas, and being thwarted by the registered domains, I ended up going with:

• howtodialinternationally.com
• howtodialinternational.com

At this point (having registered four different domain names), I'm probably going to focus on "howtodialinternationally.com" as the primary site, and use the other three as permanent redirects. It isn't perfect, but I think it'll work well to get this off the ground. I could spend another month hunting for the perfect domain, but I think once I get started and closer to launch, either something more clever may come out, or I'll stick with this.

Next steps

Now that the prototype is done and the domain is set, I'm going to do some competitive research. How ingrained are the existing services, and how hard will it be for me to unseat them as Google's #1 result? What keywords should I focus on? Where should I start? We'll soon find out.