How to choose a domain name for your Australian business

Your domain name is the one part of your web presence you will probably still have in ten years. Sites get rebuilt, hosts get changed, logos get refreshed — the domain tends to outlive all of it. Worth twenty minutes of thought.

First: .com.au, .au or .com?

For an Australian business this is usually the first real decision, and the answer is less about SEO than people think.

.com.au

The established choice for Australian businesses, and still the one most customers expect. It signals unambiguously that you are an Australian company. Registration requires an eligible Australian presence — typically an ABN or ACN — which is part of why it carries trust: not just anyone can have one.

.au (direct registration)

Shorter, newer, and increasingly common. Same Australian presence requirement. If you hold the matching .com.au you generally have priority rights to the direct .au equivalent, and many businesses register both and point one at the other.

.com

Globally recognised and worth having if you can get it, particularly if you sell outside Australia. But good .com names have been taken for two decades, and a .com does nothing to signal that you are local — which for a business serving Australian customers is often the more valuable signal.

A practical approach: register the .com.au as your primary, add the .au if it is available, and pick up the .com if it is affordable. Redirect the spares to the main one. Domains are cheap; the argument you will have if a competitor registers the near-miss version of your name is not.

What makes a good domain name

• Say it out loud. If you cannot give it over the phone without spelling it twice, it is the wrong name. This one test eliminates most bad options.
• Short beats clever. Every extra word is another chance to mistype it.
• Avoid hyphens and numbers. “Is that the number seven or s-e-v-e-n?” is a conversation you will have forever.
• Watch for accidental readings. Run the words together and read them fresh. Plenty of famous examples exist of businesses that did not.
• Do not over-optimise for keywords. cheap-plumbing-melbourne-services.com.au reads as spam to customers and does very little for rankings. Google stopped rewarding exact-match domains a long time ago.
• Leave yourself room. If you might sell more than one thing, or move beyond one suburb, do not paint the name into a corner.

Before you register: three checks

1. Trade marks. Search IP Australia. A domain does not give you rights to a name, and registering one that infringes an existing mark can cost you the domain and more.
2. Business name registration. Check ASIC. The domain and the registered business name are separate things and you generally want both.
3. Social handles. Check the same name is available on the platforms you care about, before you commit.

The boring part that actually matters

Most domain problems are not about choosing the name. They are about what happens afterwards.

• Register it in the business’s name, not an individual’s. Ideally not a former employee’s, and not a web designer’s. If you do not control the registrant details, you do not really control the domain.
• Use an email address that will outlive the job. Renewal notices going to someone who left in 2023 is one of the most common ways businesses lose a domain.
• Turn on auto-renew, and check the card on file. Expired domains can be picked up by someone else, and buying it back is expensive if it is possible at all.
• Keep a note of where it is registered. Obvious until the day you urgently need to change a DNS record and nobody knows the login.

The one-line version

Pick something short you can say over the phone, secure the .com.au, register it in the business’s own name with an address that will still work in five years, and turn on auto-renew. That is most of it.