How To Name Your Tour Operator Website

Online Marketing Travel Website January 25, 2018

When you make a tour website, the first step is usually giving it a name. Like any other website, a tour website’s name is the domain name. It represents the website’s IP address, making it easy to find on the internet.

Offline businesses have an existing name and most often businesses choose to pick the same name for their websites. But does that always make sense? Does it always have enough impact in the visitor’s mind to continue to browse your travel website? 

Abbreviated names work well for long business names, but settling for something bland will not bring heaps of visitors to your tour operator website. Your website’s name is your online brand, it affects your marketing strategy and how a customer understands your business.

Nailing your website name needs to be done on the first attempt while building your tour operator website. Here, we give you 6 principles to craft a catchy brand name –

1. Make it easy to say

website-domain-name

The name should be something that’s easy to pronounce. It should immediately focus on the travel or tour operator identity. Things that are easy to pronounce are much easier to remember. This is due to something called processing fluency. It is related to the ease with which the brain can process information, making it easy to remember.

Why is this important? Well, if people cannot remember your brand, the chances of them looking you up online and finding you are very few.

2. Short and sweet

Ease of recall comes into play, along with the punch that your tour website needs to deliver in the first few seconds. Shorter domain names are better, and you should be wise with what you choose.

Let’s look at this example, the domain, goanlyf.com is short and simple and can also be confused for goanlife.com. If you plan on using abbreviations or slangs make sure they are easy to pronounce and remember.

3. Brandable

brandable website name

Your tour operator website name should be your brand. Notice how TripAdvisor.com sounds, or yatra.com, or coorgtour.com?

Don’t use too many numbers, hyphens, strokes or periods in your domain name. They do not read well and are easily forgotten. This can get to a situation where your traffic lands on a competitors site or never finds you at all. Plus, does a brand like Delhi Hyphen Food Hyphen Tours (delhi-food-tours.com) sound good? Not in our opinion!

4. Make it intuitive with keywords

Your brand should be able to tell people what it’s all about. Names like –

give you a gist of what you’ll find on these websites and boosts the recall factor.

The use of keywords in your website name must be subtle. Google does not appreciate spammy keyword tactics. In addition to this, potential customers might see website names stuffed with keywords and consider them spam or fake.

So, do not make your domain name a search phrase like thebestdelhitours.com or bestofindiatours.com. Use the intuitive factor and insert keywords or else let them fall naturally into your domain name.

5. Don’t be a copycat

copyright infringement

It’s good to see what your travel operator competitors are doing and replicate their tactics. However, just because your competition’s name works well doesn’t mean you come up with a name almost identical to theirs.

One, your competitor can sue you for unfair trade practices.Two, it will leave people confused about who’s who. Maybe the customers of your competitor have a bad experience and tell their friends about it. What are the chances of them avoiding your website as a result?

Even if you own a domain name, a person with trademark rights to that name can sue you. So, in case you are unsure about the domain name you’ve chosen, do a bit of research.

6. Buy a .com extension

When considering extensions options, aim for a .com website extensions to go with your travel domain name. This is the most commonly used extension and is the easiest to remember. Its popularity is followed by .net. By the end of 2016, there 142,2 million domains with these extensions combined.

In our experience, it’s also the first to be used when attempting to find a website. You can go for country-specific extensions too like .in, .ca, .co.uk, etc. if you plan on keeping your tours within that specific country.  

With these rules in mind, you should have a general idea of what kind of domain names travellers and tourists are looking for. Best of luck!

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