Hey, let me paint you a picture…

Imagine that you just left your new dentist’s office after the appointment you were finally able to book after trying two times, and you need to go on his website to see the helpful resources that he told you was on his website.

But to visit his website, you need to punch in his IP address in your browser, and it looks something like “209.85.231.104”.  

Now if you can, take a minute to master this number and try repeating it exactly as it is. I mean, if you put your mind to it, I guess you can remember the dentist’s own, but now, try remembering every single website that you need to visit every single day.

In trying to carry out this exercise, I guess we can all finally realize the beauty of domain names. It’s really just a much simpler option to find the addresses of different websites that are on the internet, and like the exercise we carried out shows, it is an easier means for people who either know you or do not know you, to find you.

Now, most “website-building” platforms, including Smartbloks, which is a drag and drop website builder, can supply you with a branded domain name (e.g. eazydentist.smartbloks.site), but it is much more advisable to use a custom domain name, which in one sentence, again simply means a domain name that is yours, and yours alone. 

For example, if your brand name is “Eazy Dentist”, you can simply purchase the rights to eazydentist.com and integrate this domain right inside the Smartbloks software.

Now that we understand what a custom domain is, let’s talk about 6 important benefits of having a custom domain for your website;

1. It makes your brand easier to find: Pretty much everyone in this age and time depends on the internet to find the answers to bugging questions, or businesses that have been recommended to them. Using a custom domain name for your website means that when people go online to search for you, the exact name they put in is exactly what pops up on the first page of the search engine result because it is your domain name.
2. It establishes credibility for your brand: It is not new news that fraudulent people posing as businesses are in the same waters as the credible brands out there. Now more than ever, having a website that shows clear authority and ownership is needed to reinforce your brand’s core identity to your customers and prospective ones.

2. It maximizes your efforts on SEO: Improving certain elements of your website for SEO is an ongoing process that depends highly on the shareability of your website content. Now, getting people to share content on a website that doesn’t have a custom domain name is almost always a chore, because to most, it doesn’t appeal as a professional website. Since social sharing is now an important factor for SEO, you will soon realize that even though you’re putting out great content, your SEO score might be really poor.

3. It increases your odds of getting approved for Google Adsense: Most bloggers dream of someday, being able to monetize the traffic on their blog by getting accepted for the Google Adsense program. But it is also super important to note that Google only accepts about 3 of the 1000 Adsense applications that they get every single day. Having a custom domain name increases your chances of being one of those 3 persons, because like we mentioned in point 2, it gives you the credibility that already helps you stand out.

4. It enables you to create professional email addresses: Perception is a game that every business needs to know how to play well because it plays a very important role in helping your prospective customers decide whether or not they want to go into business with you. Communicating with a prospect using a professional address like “xavier@eazydentist.com” automatically creates a perception in the mind of your prospect, that you’re professional, and the best part is that you can then proceed to create more of these professional custom emails for the rest of your staff.

5. It improves your website ranking: Backlinks to your blog helps improve your website ranking because it tells the search engines that your website is a popular one. And the best part is that this blog page, which is a subdomain of your custom domain is not identified as a separate entity because it is still hosted on your custom domain (this is not the same with using a generic domain name). What it means is that Google will naturally rank a website that looks more detailed with what a user is searching for, than another that has the pages scattered any and everywhere.

Now that we’ve taken time to understand these six benefits of having a custom domain, it is also important to note that before you purchase a custom domain name for your brand, ensure that it is;

1. Relevant to the brand
2. Easy to remember, pronounce and spell
3. Not too long and unique 

As a bonus point, it is advisable to begin with a custom domain name from the start, because using a sub-domain from a website builder like Smartbloks will automatically reset your domain authority to zero, whenever you plan to switch or upgrade to using your own custom domain.So if you want to build a website yourself, always make sure that you use a website building platform like Smartbloks, that allows you to connect and integrate your custom domain, since you now understand the many benefits of having one.