Why you need more than one website domain

When starting a new business a few ‘essentials’ come to mind; company name – check, pricing list – check, service offering – check, shiny new stationary – check. However, what about a website domain?

A website domain is an essential part of creating your business identity and online presence, but that’s only part of the story.
In this blog we explore why when it comes to website domains one won’t do...

Idea generation:

What’s the need to have multiple?

Typos from customers
Competitors trying to steal your traffic
Malicious actors trying to impersonate you to steal money, clients etc
Name change – customers may try and enter your old domain
Geolocating

Why do you need a domain for a website?

Your company’s domain name is at the heart of everything it does online. It’s the front-end face of the business, it gives your clients’ a gateway into your online presence, and it allows your customers to immediately and easily find you. Put simply, it’s an extension of your overall brand. It goes without saying then, that you want to protect your domain with the same care and attention that you would give to your company’s store front sign. The last thing you want is a malicious attacker impersonating your brand to steal from your customers, or a competitor attempting to divert your traffic their way. But to avoid these common problems, it’s first important to understand what your domain actually is and in turn, how to protect your brand’s reputation.

What is a website domain?

Take a look at the full address of this blog at the top of your browser. The migrate365.ie is our domain. Similar to our physical street address, this is the unique web address of our website, registered so that people could easily and instantly reach our site. The domain is made up of two different parts, the Top Level Domain (TLD) and the Second Level Domain (SLD) (source). In our example, migrate365 is the SLD and .ie is the TLD. It’s important to note that migrate365.ie and migrate365.co.uk are two completely different addresses, in the same way that 151 Port Road and 291 Port Road are two separate, unrelated address with their own individual mailboxes and door numbers.

How cyber-criminals use:

Why it is important to register a website domain:

Let’s say you’re a mechanical individual looking to set up a bike store in town called BikeSupreme. You have your shop location, spare parts and friendly staff. You look to set up a website but first need to buy an appropriate domain. Choosing to cater for an initial Irish market, you decide on BikeSupreme.ie. With thousands of marketplaces to buy the domain from, you take our recommendation and buy the domain on the marketplace GoDaddy for €5.99. Your new website even ranks on the first page of Google. Great! Business is booming. As you hire more staff and sell more bikes however, problems begin to surface...

Cyber-criminals recognise that where there are popular upstarting businesses, there’s often opportunity for exploitation. Seeing that you haven’t registered the domain BikeSupreme.com, malicious actors quickly snap up the domain, as well as set up a website that looks identical to yours. By purchasing Google and Facebook Ads, using your branding and black-hate SEO, these criminals trick customers into buying from them when they think they’re buying from you. Seen as the domain looks accurate – no misspellings or 1’s instead of i’s – security padlock in place - customers shops like normal. The problem arises when customers seemingly purchase a bike or request a servicing for one. When they never get their goods or service, customers assume it was you who failed to supply them with a bike or denied them servicing they ‘rightfully’ paid for. Aside from obviously damaging brand reputation, this directly correlates with lost future sales.

Alternatively, criminals may email some of your clients saying their payment for the bike failed and ask that they send on their payment details again or charge them for additional, bogus expenses. Again, their email address appears legitimate again, having no misspellings. And so they do. While the customers are at fault for sending on the information in the first place, it doesn’t change the fact that your domain was used to dupe patrons into sending information to malicious actors. Similar email techniques would be used to harm relationships with investors, business partners and even suppliers.

Unfair competitors:

Seeing the success of your business, a competitor may try and impersonate your brand and direct customers towards their site. By registering the BikeSupreme.com, a competitor may use it to generate more popular SEO results. With better search rankings, the competitor would then take customers searching for the original BikeSupreme. Any and all customers looking to find your website would look you up on Google, see your brand’s name at the top of the search and buy from it. Unfortunately, they’d be placing money straight into the hands of a competitor leeching off the brand you worked so hard to build.

Genuine Mistakes:

To quickly get to a website, we’ll often type the domain straight into the address bar to skip the step of searching Google. This would look like typing BikeSupreme.com straight into the address bar and landing at our website instantly, instead of searching Bike Supreme, arriving at Google and pressing the first entry that appears before finally landing at our website. However, when we do things this quickly, we often make mistakes. Imagine, instead typing BikeSurpeme.com into the address bar. We’d be led to a website controlled by a competitor, attacker or even blank page saying it doesn’t exist. Very quickly, the prospective customer looking to spend money on our goods and services doesn’t even get a chance to see our website. What’s worse, they may even land on a competitor’s website.

When we describe our name to a prospective client, it’s not uncommon for them to search us and misspell our domain, perhaps inserting a “-” in the middle. To combat this, we also purchased the migrate-365.ie and redirected it to the main website. That way, if anyone misspelled our main domain (by forgetting the hyphen), they will still be brought to our website.

Typosquatters:

If there’s a way to make a quick quid, someone will find it and exploit it. Imagine some budding, entrepreneurial grey-hat hears your business has recently started up. What’s more, they see you also haven’t registered the BikeSupeme.com domain. They quickly snatch up the domain, with the hopes that as your business grows, you’ll seek to purchase a domain more suitable for a global audience. When you look to move in that market, a domain that once cost €6 often turns upwards of €20,000.

Conclusion:

There’s no doubt that registering a single domain is not enough anymore. From malicious actors looking to steal your traffic, to stealing your customers’ banking information, threats using your good brand and domain are all around. A simple, inexpensive purchase can help prevent all of this. By purchasing your domain in common misspellings and the popular TLD’s, you can put yourself on the front foot and take one more step in protecting your business’ brand.