What startup names are most effective?

Entrepreneurs take a long journey when naming their brainchild, comparable to a parent naming their own flesh and blood.

There are many reasons behind naming – one untalked-of and probably the most important. This is, how to choose a name that gets you more business.

Technology changes how we do business. So, when developing a business name, putting some thought into how people are going to find you and what you want them to do after they find you could go a long way.

Ignoring this could do just the opposite and result in being harder to find, getting less return from your advertising and having your competitors capitalize off your brand.

Businesses have been using things like alphabetical order, call to action, keywords and more to shape business names for optimized discovery, recall and responsiveness since the phone book.

When looking for a business, I’m sure you’ve seen at least one of these two business name optimizations frequently used in the past for discovery:

1. Optimizing for discovery in phone books

Pre-internet, a listing in the phone book was key to getting your business discovered – but how did businesses get to the top of the list in their category? Piece of cake. Free listings in the white pages were categorized by business type and ordered alphabetically. Many companies ended their name with a describing word of their category and started it with something like “AAA” “AA”, “AA1” and “A AAA” to be one of the first listings in their category. You will still find thousands of these business names in different locations by typing “AAA” into yellowpages.com.

2. And a similar strategy was used for search-engine discovery

Prior to 2012, search engine algorithms gave weight in their rankings to sites that included keywords in their domain, otherwise known as exact-match domains. So, Google was more likely to rank “accountantsmelbourne-dot-com” higher than “abc-partners-dot-com” if a user searched for “Accountants Melbourne” because the keywords matched the search with similar words in its domain.

Over time, domain names and business names alike grew longer. Many were purposefully packed with every major keyword applicable to their niche.

Both of these strategies helped get businesses discovered and earn new business, but the popularity of these types of business names meant many brands started to look the same and harder for the customer to recall. For instance, was I supposed to call “A-AA Locksmith” or “AA Locksmith?” Or is it “accountantsmelbourne-dot-com”, “melbourneaccountants-dot-com” or “accountants-in-melbourne-dot-com” that’s my accountant?

Today, keywords still play a critical role in App names for discovery, with search accounting for 65 percent of downloads in Apple’s app store. Most of the apps on my phone are brand + keyword App names like Google Maps. When searching the app store for “Music” you should find names like Samsung Music, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music dominating the first page.

Business names have also been optimized for direct response and to bypass the friction of searching and the competition within.

Phone names spell a business name on your dial pad. They’re easier to remember than a phone number because a customer simply dials the name of the company using the letters on their dial pad. For instance 1-800 FLOWERS, instead of 1-800-356-9377.

With a business name being more memorable and a call-to-action itself, companies using phone names have experienced higher call rates, recall, and word of mouth with reports of up to 5 times more effectiveness than phone numbers.

Just like a domain name, they’re prime real estate. In 1986, a chain of local New York florists called Flora Plenty bought out a telemarketer known as 800-Flowers for $2 million just so they could change their name to 1-800-Flowers for 24-hour phone orders and national delivery. This also made them the first company whose name was a phone number.

By 1999, 1-800-Flowers had renamed to 1-800-Flowers.com for e-commerce as they went public.

In the 90s, adding “.com” to company names was a popular tactic to get soaring share prices during the dot-com boom.

These companies also reaped another reward when making this change and its why some companies would still brand themselves as a domain name today. It transforms their name into their business’s destination and takes the guesswork away from the consumer of how to find the company.

Consumers don’t always guess a business’s domain name and if they do, there is a chance they could get it wrong and land on another site with a similar URL.

Search engines like Google are also commonly used to find the brands website by typing in branded search terms.

Prime Google real-estate is the top paid-search ads. Any competitor brand can advertise on Google ads for any brand search term (the only restriction is you can’t put a trademarked brand-word into the ad).

So, even after a brand has won a consumer, they still have to fight another brand battle in search.

A company can lure business away from competitors by using their competitors brand names as keywords in Google search campaigns. Not only do those competitors lose business because of this, but they also need to pay to advertise for their own brand terms to ensure their ads appear above those of the companies doing the name-borrowing.

Here’s a branded search battle between three major players in shaving.

Using the Google Ads keyword planner, you can get an idea of the cost for companies to protect their brand traffic and capitalize off their competitors.

If a consumer remembers a brand rather as a domain name then they can type the brand as a URL on their search engines and address bars instead of searching for a brand term, if that’s all they had to go off and remembered.

And, when a business is being referred to as a domain name, it’s then a call to action and not a mission to search that branded keyword.

In this instance, the “.com” name has bypassed the friction of a search engine and the competition within.

So, don’t forget about doing a little business name optimization (BNO) when developing your name to make it an effective one.