Reputation Management, Part Thirteen: What’s in a Name? Protecting Your Brand

As a lawyer, your brand is one of your most important assets. Your company’s name recognition and any positive or negative associations represent its potential for success or failure. This is ultimately why you have to keep tabs on the Internet for any and all discussion of your law firm and your brand. One oft-overlooked form of reputation management involves purchasing domain names related to your company as a means of damage control.

How to choose which domain names to buy

It goes without saying that you should buy the .com, .net, .org and all other public domain versions of your main website. If you have the funds, you should also buy common misspellings close to your domain name. This is because sometimes,unscrupulous individuals wishing to do harm to your brand will buy websites related to your business. If you can buy them first, you may be able to head off potential crises.

Make a list of all the domains you might want to buy, including any potential secondary “spin-off” sites with catchy titles. Ohio consumer collections lawyers, for example, could buy http://www.ohioconsumercollectionslawyers.com if it is an available domain.

How to buy domain names

First, check to see if anyone owns your domains by using the “bulk upload” feature on a domain registry site like GoDaddy. If nobody owns a domain, it is easy to purchase. Simply register the domain in your name. However, if you think of a catchy name for your company and the domain has already been taken, you may have to engage in some negotiation with the owner.

You can contact the owner by finding contact information on the site or use the whois directory for owner information. Once you find the owner, contact him or her and see if the domain is for sale. You may be able to agree on a price, but keep in mind that the shorter and punchier the domain name is, the more it is likely to cost. Good domains could cost thousands of dollars.

Domain name management is an important part of reputation management. Your domain name is often the first thing people see in a search engine. Make sure you own your domain name and that it matches your positive brand!

Want to know what’s up next in our series? Part Fourteen covers blogging to protect your reputation.