Wedding Professionals, Stationery Retailers, and Event Planners; I hope to be the most important Brian Lawrence in your world. However, when searching on Google for “Brian Lawrence” I found many other brethren with that name. A baseball player, a professor, a soccer coach and someone I hope I am never confused with, (an escaped murderer).
While we live in a world of identify theft and mistaken identity, I have secured my own online identity as long as I want it. I own BrianLawrence.com. Today it is merely something to talk about, but owning the domain name of your name becomes more important as you become more recognizable.
That same logic applies to your business domain and domains that describe your business. With all the other benefits that the right domain name can bring you, protecting your brand and taking away a search term like weddingphotographersBoston.com from your competitor is worthwhile for that reason alone. In reality, owning the right domain name is like getting on an express elevator that helps you skip many steps you would normally have to take to get on top of the search engines. You still need to walk through other steps to reach the top but the right name can catapult through a great part of the journey.
An example I personally experienced is when I was with Encore Studios and we launched weddinginvitations.com as a standalone site several years year ago, after pointing it to our main web site for many years. Within a month, with the help of an optimized site, when a customer did a search for “wedding invitations”, the site was on page one of Bing and Yahoo and on page 2 of Google out of millions of results. That was without any back linking or other seo strategies that are implemented after a site is designed.
As for my status of online prominence, I do not want to be confused with the murderer, Brian Lawrence, so for the time being I will lay low with brianlawrence.com