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.