How to choose a domain name for your business

The SiteRoot team · 1 August 2026 · 6 min read

You have decided to get a website, and the very first question anyone asks you is what the address will be. So you sit down with a notepad, type six ideas into a registrar, and every one of them comes back taken. An hour later you are considering something with a hyphen in it.

Here is the short answer, so you can stop. Use your business name, followed by .com.au, spelled exactly the way you would say it down the phone to someone standing in a noisy driveway. If that one is gone, add the word for what you do or the city you do it in. Do not add a hyphen, a number, or a clever misspelling. Those three are how a good name becomes one nobody can type.

The rest of this is what sits behind that, and what to do in the awkward cases.

.com.au or .com, and does it matter

For a business that serves Australian customers, .com.au is the better buy. It says where you are before anyone reads a word, and Australians typing a local business into a phone add .com.au without thinking.

Two things are worth knowing before you try to buy one.

• A .com.au is not open to anyone. You need an Australian presence behind it: an ABN, an ACN, a registered business name, or an Australian trade mark. You cannot grab the address first and sort the business out afterwards.
• The name itself has to relate to you. Since the .au rules changed in 2021, a .com.au has to match your business name or the name you trade under, or describe what you actually sell. Registering a pile of unrelated words for later is not allowed, and a lot of the advice floating around online predates that change. Ask the registrar to confirm eligibility before you pay.

There is also .au on its own now, the short one without the com, which opened in 2022. It is fine, and it is worth registering alongside your .com.au if the name is available, mostly so nobody else has it. Point one at the other.

A plain .com is not wrong. It is just usually taken, it costs more to prise off whoever has it, and in a list of local results it reads as a business that could be anywhere. If you sell overseas, buy it. Otherwise it is optional, and the novelty endings are cheap for a reason.

The phone test, which every good domain passes

This is the whole test, and it takes ten seconds.

Say the name out loud to someone who has never heard it, as if you were on a bad line from a job site. Then ask them to write it down. If what they write is not what you meant, the name has failed, no matter how good it looks on a business card.

What that rules out, in practice:

• Hyphens. Nobody says "hyphen" out loud, and the version without it usually belongs to someone else, so you spend years losing people to a competitor.
• Numbers. Is that "4" or "four"? You will be spelling it out for the rest of your life.
• Deliberate misspellings. Kwik, Xtra, Kolour. Cute in a logo, a disaster in an address bar.
• Two words that collide. If your business is Cairns Services, the joined-up version has three s characters in a row and reads wrong.
• Anything over about twenty characters. It has to survive being typed with one thumb.

Length beats cleverness. Short, obvious and slightly boring wins.

Should you put your trade or your suburb in it

It is worth doing for one reason and not for the reason people usually give.

The good reason: a human being reading a list of results can tell what you do before they click. An address that says plumbing in it is doing a small, real job for you at the moment of choosing.

The reason that is oversold: putting a keyword in your address is not a lever on where you turn up in a search result. That idea is fifteen years out of date and anyone still selling it to you should be treated with suspicion.

The catch is that both a trade and a suburb lock you in. The electrician who registered a Northcote address and now works across the whole northern suburbs has a name that is quietly wrong, and changing your address later means changing every sign, invoice, van and quote template you own. If you might broaden out, keep the name about the business rather than the postcode.

Check it is actually free before you buy it

Available at a registrar only means nobody has registered that exact string. It does not mean the name is yours to use.

Four checks, all free, all under five minutes:

1. Search ASIC's business names register and the ABN lookup for the name. Someone trading under it already is a problem.
2. Search IP Australia's trade mark database. A registered trade mark in your industry is a bigger problem, and finding out after you have printed the signage is the expensive way.
3. Search the name itself. A business two states away with the same name is survivable. One in your city doing your trade is not.
4. Check the social handles you want while you are there, so the whole set matches.

If something turns up and you are unsure, that is a question for a lawyer rather than for a forum. It is cheaper than a rebrand.

Buying it, and the part everyone gets wrong

Buy it from a registrar yourself, with your own account, your own email address, and your business details as the registrant. A .com.au runs about A$10 to A$30 a year. Look at the renewal price, not the first-year special.

Then do these three things, because this is where domains are actually lost:

• Register it in your name, not your web person's. If a designer registers it "as a favour" under their account, your address is not yours. Getting it back later is a slow conversation with someone you have stopped paying, and sometimes it does not end well.
• Use an email address you will still have in three years. Not a staff member's, not the one attached to an internet provider you might leave. Every warning you will ever get about this domain goes there.
• Turn auto-renew on and keep the card current. An expired domain takes your website and your email down together, and there is a window afterwards where someone else can take it. Owners who lose a domain almost never lose it on purpose. They lose it to an expired credit card.

What to do when the name you want is gone

In order of what usually works:

1. Add the word for what you do. Not the whole phrase, just the one word: plumbing, dental, electrical, legal.
2. Add the city, if you are confident you will stay in it.
3. Add a short word that reads naturally: co, group, hq.
4. Try .au on its own.
5. Change the business name. Painful, but if you are early, it is the cleanest fix.

Buying it from whoever holds it is the last option. Some are genuinely for sale, most parked names are held by people waiting for exactly your phone call, and the price goes up the moment they can tell you want it.

Where SiteRoot comes into it

We do not sell you the domain and we do not hold it. You buy it from a registrar in your own name, for the A$10 to A$30 a year above, and it stays yours whatever you decide about us later. That is the way round it should be.

What we do is the part after it. You answer a handful of questions about your business, a site gets built from them in about fifteen minutes, and you point your address at it. Building is free, so you can see the thing before you decide anything.

And if you have not settled on a name yet, the domain is the easiest part to get wrong and the most expensive to change. Take the extra afternoon.