Why this matters more than people think.
I have helped name and launch five businesses of my own, and worked on the naming side of plenty more for clients across Kent. The domain is not just a web address — it is the thing you say on a business card, dictate over the phone to a customer in Deal, put on the side of your van, and hand over to Google to index for the next decade. Getting it right at the start costs nothing. Changing it later costs time, money, and SEO equity you have spent months building.
The most common mistake I see is founders treating the domain as an afterthought — they settle on a business name, find the obvious domain is taken, and pick something slightly off as a compromise. That compromise then follows the business everywhere.
.co.uk or .com — here is my honest view.
If your customers are primarily in the UK, get the .co.uk. Full stop. Most customers in Kent, Canterbury, Dover, or anywhere else in England will instinctively trust a .co.uk over an unfamiliar extension. It also signals clearly that you are a UK-based business, which matters for local search and for the kind of trust signals that convert a browsing visitor into someone who actually picks up the phone.
That said, I always recommend registering both if you can. A .co.uk and a .com for the same name will cost you around £20–£25 per year combined through a registrar like Namecheap or 123-reg. Point the .com to the .co.uk and you have covered the bases. What you want to avoid is leaving the .com sitting unclaimed only for a competitor — or a domain squatter — to pick it up six months later.
The newer extensions like .io, .studio, or .shop have their place in certain markets. For a Kent tradesperson or local retailer, I would not bother. The .co.uk is still the trust signal that matters here.
Keyword domain or brand domain — which wins?
There was a time, around 2010 to 2014, when owning something like kentplumber.co.uk gave you a meaningful advantage in Google search results. Exact-match domains had disproportionate ranking power. That era is largely over. Google has significantly reduced that effect, and a keyword-stuffed domain can now read as low-quality rather than authoritative.
That said, keywords in a domain are not worthless. They help with relevance signals, they make the site's purpose immediately obvious, and they can help clicks in search results where the URL is visible. The question is whether the keyword domain is also a decent brand — something pronounceable, memorable, and not embarrassing on a letterhead.
My own rule: if a keyword domain reads naturally and you can build a real brand around it, take it. If it requires a hyphen or reads like a directory listing (best-plumber-ashford-kent.co.uk), treat it as a second domain you redirect from, not your primary identity.
The four tests I run before committing to a name.
Before I register anything — whether it is for my own project or for a client — I run it through four quick checks:
The phone test. Say it out loud and pretend you are leaving a voicemail for someone who has never heard of you. If you have to spell it, explain the hyphen, or repeat yourself, that is a problem. A Canterbury kitchen fitter who trades as Acorn Kitchens can say that clearly. Someone who chose AKD-Kitchens-CKT.co.uk cannot.
The spelling test. Ask someone to type it from memory after hearing it once. Double letters, unusual spellings, and words that sound like other words all cause friction. I once watched a business lose a meaningful slice of direct traffic because their name contained a word that had two common spellings and they had registered only one.
The trademark check. This is one most people skip, and it can bite hard. Before you commit to a name and build a brand around it, run a quick search on the UK Intellectual Property Office's trademark register at gov.uk. If someone has a registered trademark in your sector for that name, you could face a legal challenge down the line — and moving a live business to a new domain is painful. Takes ten minutes; worth doing.
The Companies House check. If you are incorporating or plan to, search Companies House too. The name does not have to be identical to your domain, but a close match to an existing company in the same sector creates confusion and potential objection.
What to do when your first choice is taken.
It almost always is. The question is what to do about it. There are three sensible options, and one bad one.
First, check whether the taken domain is actually in use. A surprising number of domains are registered but sitting dormant. If the owner is using it actively, it is generally not worth pursuing — the cost and complication of buying it from them rarely makes sense for a new business. But if it is parked with no content, a polite direct email sometimes works. I have picked up a couple of domains this way for under £200 each. Worth a try.
Second, consider a natural variation. Adding a location (acornkitchenscanterbury.co.uk) or a descriptor (acornkitchenfit.co.uk) often works if it still reads naturally. Avoid the words official, direct, or the as prefixes — they suggest you are the second choice.
Third, revisit the name. If your first-choice domain is taken and no variation feels right, that is sometimes the prompt to reconsider the name itself. I have done this. It feels like going backwards, but it is much cheaper than spending three years on a name that never quite fits.
The bad option, which I see regularly: register the domain with a hyphen because the unhyphenated version is taken. Hyphens in domains are a persistent low-level problem. They are hard to say, easy to mistype, and associated in most people's minds with spam-adjacent sites from the early 2000s. Avoid them if you possibly can.
Where to actually register it, and what to watch out for.
I use Namecheap for most domain registrations. Clear pricing, no dark patterns on renewal, and the management interface is straightforward. 123-reg is popular with UK businesses and has decent support if you prefer something with a UK phone number. Both are fine.
What I would avoid: registering your domain through your hosting provider if they are not primarily a registrar. Some web hosts offer free domain registration as a bundle, which sounds convenient until you want to move provider and discover the transfer process is deliberately obstructive, or the renewal price after year one has quietly doubled.
One practical point: register the domain in your own name or your company name, not your web developer's account. I have seen this cause genuine problems — the developer goes quiet, changes career, or simply does not renew — and the business loses a domain they have been trading on for years. Your domain, your account. Always.
A note on email addresses while you are at it.
Once you have the domain, set up a proper email address on it immediately. A business that is still emailing from a Gmail or Hotmail address while asking customers to trust them with a payment does itself a quiet disservice. Google Workspace starts at around £5.20 per user per month; Microsoft 365 Business Basic is similar. Both give you hello@yourbusiness.co.uk and professional credibility that a free webmail address simply cannot match.
This is not a vanity point. In my experience, a matching domain and email address is one of those small signals that adds up — particularly for trades and local service businesses where trust is everything and most of the competition is still on personal email accounts.
The decision is not final, but changing later is expensive.
I want to be honest about something: domain decisions are not irreversible. Businesses rebrand, redirect old domains, and start fresh. I have done it. But the cost — in SEO, in reprinting materials, in updating Google Business Profile and Yell listings and every other directory your name appears in — is real and cumulative. The further you build on a domain, the more it costs to move.
So spend an afternoon on this, not five minutes. Run the tests. Check the trademark register. Say it out loud to someone who has nothing to do with your business and see if they can repeat it back. It is a small investment of time at the start that pays back steadily for as long as the business runs.