Bada-Bing, Bada-Google, Bada-Performance? The Pursuit of the Perfect  Web 2.0 Brand Name

With the advent of the beautifully onomatopoeic brand name Bing into the wider web language over the last few weeks (is it a rooted in US-Italian clichés, microwave sounds, a Google-baiting acronym or some bizarre Friends reference?), we’ve been looking at the age-old question of, “What makes an internet brand name successful?”.

Of course the obvious answer to such a question is a successful product and good marketing, alongside a plethora of other factors. But let’s put those aside for now along with many of our SEO-preconceptions, and consider what an optimum internet brand name is all about in the most modern of worlds.

Originality and Searchability

In typical fashion, I’m going to renege on my last sentiments and suggest you might like to consider briefly some SEO tactics, albeit pretty basic ones. It’s a pretty obvious point to start. Search for Twitter, and you’ll inevitably get the main site straight up as your number one result. If you’d have searched for it three years ago when it was fresh out of Jack Dorsey’s mind, I’d say it is pretty likely that after very little SEO work, if any, Twitter.com would be the top of the Google results.

Now consider an imaginary brand name, I’m going to suggest “Horse” as a random example as I’m feeling particularly creative today.  “Horse”, as discussed in your early branding meetings, is a fantastic name apt to both your purposes and services; you’re a new company aiming to help people return products to stores, acting as a middle man for lazy shoppers too fat and lazy to return their size-Battleship clothes to the stores. Genius, I know. It’s a handy acronym too, standing for Happy Or Return Sans Energy. Classy. Even better, you don’t have to work too hard on a clever logo, you just nip down to the local fields and conduct a quick photo-shoot with any willing equine. Anyway, I digress. Essentially the obvious point it that horse, although a carefully worked brand name, is a very competitive keyword. It’s going to take some effort to displace the Wikipedia result and some ancient domain names, so organic traffic is going to take a long, long time. There is of course some call to suggest that you might expose your brand name to increased traffic through the generic keywords, but it’s hardly likely to be interested or targeted users clicking deliberately for quite some time.

Snappiness

As with all brand names, a good internet company wants a snappy name. If you want to stand out, you don’t want the same old clichés – for example within the book world names like “Book Readers” and “Book Lovers” will no doubt have gone pretty quickly long before web 2.0 came into existence and will most likely trouble to interest the modern 2.0 web users looking for distinction in a busy field. A good idea might be to buy up any obvious domains – myHORSE.com and so on – and then 401 them onto your site to ensure the optimum traffic.

 If you’re a site that is looking to target the masses a la Myspace and co, you probably want a short and snappy title. A more professional outfit might want a longer name, but nothing too lengthy.  Short and short domain names might have disappeared from the domain sales but there remain plenty of ideas. Four letter domain names are inevitably in demand and expensive but you may find the slightly stranger ones may be cheaper for your company to buy – digg.com probably cost a lot less than something like sofa.com, but once the brand is established it is just as valuable. Check out the convoluted pursuit of sofa.com to understand how much these domains are worth to some companies.

Short and sharp brand names also help with recognisability, at least in theory. If you go too bizarre, complicated or unpronounceable you run the risk of scaring/putting people off. Obviously Cuil has failed because it is by and large rubbish, brought up porn images alongside standard web searches and isn’t Google, but it’s also a bit of a difficult brand name; do you say cool, chule, coo-ill, coil? Just because you think it sounds classy to give you site a Gaelic name doesn’t mean others will. Personally I prefer “Horse”.

Relevance

Ideally a brand name should be able to be adapted and made into words that might link to your product. Twitter is perfect, not least because it arises from the word that best describes the inane ramblings of many a celebrity and non-celebrity on its interfaces. It could be suggested in the same way that Facebook is not so clever. It is an apt name sure, and its sheer popularity has led to its use by spotty youths and aged retirees alike as a verb: “I’ll facebook you the details”. This might be in part due to social networking not really having a catchy name like email (I’ve never hotmailed or gmailed anybody to my knowledge, but I have emailed them), and of course its domination of the media, but it’s far from the perfect brand name in my opinion. The baby site Gurgle has a great brand name as it’s clever and relevant to the actually site content (though even brand names like this will have to pay a fair amount for the domain name). It’s not always easy to balance the two, but it’s worth the extra thought.

Abbreviations

It seems that abbreviations are out. Maybe it’s because of the price of domain names or simply the fact that names like BBC and CNN are a lot less aesthetic and intriguing than Flickr and Google. It’s also harder to give an impression of what your company is about within an abbreviation (not that Google gives you any such allusions). Still, best to leave these to the long-established names.

Conclusions, or lack thereof

So all-in-all, as is expected and probably axiomatic to all, there’s no magic brand-name rule. But there are evidently lots of things to ponder for the web and SEO purposes alongside the regular “cool/useful name” considerations. The secret to a successful brand is obviously the product or services themselves, but there’s little doubt that there’s a lot in a name in the internet world. Would Google be as successful today if it had been called “Grandma’s Knickers”? It’s debatable. There certainly might have been a few unfortunate search/image results come up alongside if it had been.

What do others feel? Have we missed any glaringly obvious holes in the brand-name ideas section? Are there any top SEO tips when choosing a brand name? And what are your favourites?

Don’t be shy, let us know!