If there’s one thing that surprises me about web hosting companies, it’s that most of them do a lousy job of selling domain names. I find web hosts tend to treat domain names as an afterthought, rather than as a crucial part of their business, which is strange; after all, most everything a web host sells starts with first selling a domain name.

If you operate a web hosting company, try this exercise: enter a two-word query like ‘apple pie’ in the domain name search box on your website. If your site’s response is something like, “Sorry, you need to enter your query in the form of a URL,” there’s a good chance domains have become an afterthought to you, too. This is not to say that you’ve been negligent – very literal ‘yes/no’ domain name lookups have been the standard for years. But these days, people expect your domain name lookup to work like a search engine. Many queries are entered as keywords, email addresses or using extraneous characters like ! or &.

Moreover, it is no secret that increasing scarcity in the .com name space is making it more difficult for customers to find the name they want. The domain name search box tends to be the first step in your sales process, so making it difficult for customers to easily find a name means you’re turning away potential sales.

Because of this, I always encourage our resellers to optimize their domain search by using our multi-faceted NAME_SUGGEST API call. The NAME_SUGGEST call does several things:

• Keyword-based lookups: Entering ‘rocker@heavymetal.com’ will check the availability of all sorts of names, including rocker.com, rocker-heavymetal.com, heavymetal.com and more – all at once.
• Name suggestions: The call can also return results from our Name Suggestion Tool, which provides awesome suggestions for available names based on a variety of parameters.
• Premium domain names: Our premium names database has hundreds of thousands of names that are taken, but available for sale for a one-time fee, with no auction or escrow period required. Heavymetal.com might be taken, but heavymetalalbums.com is available as a premium domain name through Tucows.

To see all of this in action, our Technical Evangelist Joey deVilla built The Duke of URL, a demonstration site that takes domain name queries and returns availability for .com, .net and .org along with name suggestions and premium names.

The next time you look at your website, ask yourself: am I giving my customers every opportunity to find what they’re looking for? If not, it might be time to re-think how you treat domain names.

To find out more about how the NAME_SUGGEST call works, check out this entry on our Developer Blog.

Posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 11:01 am by Adam Eisner.
Filed under: Domain Names.
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