Lay My Hat

I know there are a lot of questions on here about domain names, but I am going to also ask advice please! We have just completed our cottage purchase (hurrah!) and I am looking at buying a domain name. Do you think the name of the cottage and the town is best or should I put in the word 'holiday'?
Am thinking it would be best to buy both .com and .co.uk if possible?
Also, does upper and lower case come into things? If I do all lower case, would it still come up if someone used upper case letters as the first letter of the words?

Thank you again in advance for your invaluable help!

Have the cottage name would certainly help when people are looking directly for you and the town be be good for SEO. So would holiday. As for which exact combination is best, it's very difficult to say.

.co.uk would have a tiny advantage for UK visitors searching for your site but I doubt it would be noticeable. I had both .co.uk and .com for a few years and still have no idea if it helped. It shouldn't do any harm though and only costs 10 quid.

Domain names are not case sensitive so it doesn't matter how you type it in. Same with Email addresses.

cottagename+town+holiday might get a bit long. I'd probably stick to cottagename+town and put 'Holiday Cottage' in the title/heading.

The main reason for having both .com and .co.uk would be to prevent someone else using them. You would probably only be using one or other. As Kev said, the choice of which one to use doesn't make much difference.

I wouldn’t worry too much about going to 3 words in a domain name. Gone are the days when it was considered too long, unless you’re some big corporate company. As long as it makes sense, not a silly length and is memorable, that’s what counts. It’s often easier to remember 3 words than trying to add hyphens or abbreviate. It will depend really on your house and town name.

Depending on how your browser is setup, if you use Google search, then you can start typing in something to search for. If enabled, Google will offer keyword suggestions. A good trick is to try and have a domain that matches one of these Google suggestions.

Thank you very much- think I'll go for house name which is 2 words anyway- holywellcottage and town. If I was to put holywellholidaycottage and town it would split up the name of the cottage so may not be good idea.

malvernholywellcottage.com & .co.uk both availble with one.com 1st 12-months free.

I recently bought a domain name from Namecheap & used the new .uk extension rather than the older .co.uk, was informed that this is the way to go!

You can also get .holiday now so you could have hollywellcottagemalvern.holiday

They're a bit more expensive to register than .co.uk. I'm not sure if people understand these new domains yet and whether you'll find them adding .com or .co.uk on the end anyway because it doesn't look right and then of course it won't work.

We've got the .holiday versions of our names and have them forwarded to our .co.uk website. IIRC if you own the .co.uk you get first refusal on the equivalent .holiday

At the moment I think there may be a slight advantage for us in having .co.uk over .com because it may pick up people looking for holidays in Chester UK rather than Chester USA. I've got no evidence of that though - it was just a way of deciding which way to go.

Also, the .com versions of our names weren't available. They're not being used for holiday cottages so I don't think that will be a problem if people try to guess them. In an ideal world I would own them as well but it gets quite restrictive if you're trying to find a unique name that's available in all the relevant domains.

By the way, I would try typing in all the similar versions of your name to see what people will get if they guess it wrongly. Try adding hyphens and changing the word order, etc. if an established direct competitor comes up then you might have to rethink the name.

It's definitely worth spending time (and money) on this because your cottage name and domain name are a key part of your marketing.

I've lapsed the .co.uk version of my domain. I was persuaded to add it for peanuts but at renewal they hiked the price considerably. I will stick with .com and am guessing that I will be offered .co.uk again, plus other variants, as no one else is ever going to want them.