A premium domain name gives your business instant credibility and puts you on an even playing field with even your largest competitors.

A targeted, premium domain name tells your audience that you mean business and helps online shoppers and customers to see you as a forward-thinking company.

Leveraging the right domain names will build your brand by creating a strong image for your business and can mean the difference in whether you or your competitors get the lion’s share of online business.

If you think having one domain name is sufficient, think again. By not owning multiple domains, you are literally costing your business traffic and customers and leaving your valuable keywords, brands, and search phrases wide open to your competitors.

Owning multiple domains allows you to be at the forefront of your industry. Your potential customers and clients will recognize you as the authority as your links appear to them multiple times in different searches.

Multiple domain names will allow you to track the success of individual marketing and advertising campaigns while being easily recognizable to new clients and customers.

In most cases, purchasing additional domains is a smart business decision for branding, marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Owning multiple domains isn’t just about catching traffic or protecting your brand. You can use additional domains to serve a specific purpose.

If you already have a core domain name for your business, and you want to run a marketing or ad campaign, you’ll need to track customer behavior to measure success.

Using domains specifically for your promotional campaigns, such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads, is a smart way to know exactly where the traffic originated and how you acquired a customer.

It’s particularly useful when advertising a domain name via an off-line channel where a prospect cannot click on a URL, such as a newspaper, magazine, or radio ad.

For example, if you’re a car dealer in Boston and you want to run an ad promoting a clearance sale, instead of saying, “go to MajorCarsAndTrucksOfBoston.com/shop/sale/clearance,” you should use a specific, memorable domain like BostonCars.com or BostonTrucks.com to drive customers to the promotion.

It should be something concise and easy to remember long after the customer has heard the radio ad or saw the print ad.

For SEO purposes, when you have various products or brands that cater to different audiences, you can take advantage of owning specific domains for various promotions.

This will help you take up more “real estate” in search results and capture far more attention.

A popular way to implement this strategy is to create microsites with unique content that fills a need for your audience. The microsites can then link to your main business site if that’s your goal.

An additional way to implement this strategy is to use “redirects”. By doing this, you’ll be able to permanently redirect your secondary domains to your primary domain. With redirects, all of the rankings from the secondary domains to your primary one will boost overall rankings in search.

By not implementing a multi-domain strategy for your business, you are absolutely losing a boatload of web traffic and therefore lots of potential new clients and customers.

Even worse, your loss usually is to the benefit of your competition. Not only are you not generating that extra business, but a large percentage of the available prospect pool is landing on your competitor’s sites instead. A double whammy.

The right domain name can attract new “walk-in” business. If you decide to register a domain name that matches the concept of your business (instead of your exact business name), you will likely draw web surfers in search of that topic.

For instance, a florist in Riverside who purchases the domain name RiversideRoses.com can attract visitors who are looking for roses in their town when searching on on the internet.

RiversideRoses.com could show up more frequently and more prominently than their competitor’s “business name” websites.

You can redirect a specific domain name to your Facebook Page, your Etsy profile, your Google Maps listing, or anything you want.

This means that, if someone types your domain name into their browser, they’ll end up on whatever page you want them to end up on.

In the short term, this gives people an easy way to find your profile on those services.

Redirects are easy to set up.

Most people won’t find your website by typing your domain into their browser. They’re far more likely to find your site by searching for keywords related to your business.

A site without a targeted domain name could end up ranking lower in the search results for many different reasons, so your would-be customers may very well end up browsing your competition instead of you.

Hosting your content on a third-party blogging or social media platform can seem unprofessional, and undermine your efforts to build a business or professional identity. Using a variety of quality domain names makes you the authority rather than the third-party platform.

Never rely on a third-party platform to maintain your traffic and content. For many legitimate reasons, they may at any time block or eliminate the service they are currently providing to you.

Your content and online identity can be wiped out in an instant.

On the other hand, when you own your own domain names, you can set up your sites with any hosting company you like, anywhere in the world. The content you place there remains yours to move to any web hosting provider you’d like at any time.

Buying rights to a domain name reserves the name exclusively for your use for as long as you keep it registered.

Good domain names go a long way toward generating traffic to your website, attracting new clients before your competitors do, and building your reputation. That, in turn, will result in more customers and far better sales.