Marketing for Translators: how to create a compelling domain name or tagline to boost your business?

Actually, it’s quite difficult for translators to create an original dot-com: there are currently 15,532 domain names with TRANSLATION inside! (counted on 2011-06-19 in the Verisign dot-com's zone file, updated each day).

So I analyzed these 15,532 dot-com names in order to identify creative paths and I finished to come up with 9 useful paths to create compelling domain names or taglines.

But let’s see how I proceeded to get this result.

First I eliminated TRANSLATION/S and numbers from all names to analyze the remaining co-occurrences. Why? Because it’s too obvious that if you try to optimize your ranking in SERPs around the TRANSLATION keyword, you’ve to sort the best combinations of other related keywords to get a good organic SEO positioning on this topic.

Once I’d extracted all terms, I got 8,026 related keywords: 7,833 with 1 to 9 occurrences (97,6%), and 193 with 10 occurrences and more (2,4%). Since I couldn’t analyze thoroughly almost 8 thousand words, I focused on these 193 keywords which totalized globally 6,984 occurrences (56,73% of 12,311 occurrences for the remaining 7,833 words). So it means that these few keywords (170 after lemmatizing and unifying similar concepts: MEDICAL / MEDICINE / MED / HEALTH = MEDICAL, for instance) weigh more than all the other ones.

Main insight: the first concept associated with TRANSLATION is the one of SERVICE (we get 820 SERVICE/S occurrences).

At the opposite, the second one is more surprising: for 15,532 dot-com, JUST ONE does associate TRANSLATION and COMMUNICATION in the name!!! (In fact we’ve got only 6 domain names with COMMUNICAT* inside, but 5 are parking sites and just this one, which is a redirection).

Now, breaking through the 9 creative paths, we’ve got at both ends of the range a Denominative Path (name of person or entity, pseudonym, alias or commercial name) and a Disruption Path, with 7 other paths in between:

1. Language Path = 2387 occurrences (36 keywords)

2. Sector Path = 902 occurrences (18 keywords)

3. Geographic Path = 557 occurrences (28 keywords)

4. Nouns / Qualifiers Path = 560 occurrences (14 keywords)

5. Connectors Path (prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, adverbs, verbs, etc.). = 912 occurrences (18 keywords)

6. Generic Path (translation related) = 899 occurrences (36 keywords)

7. Professional Path = 767 occurrences (20 keywords)

In conclusion, the Denominative Path may be the more obvious, using a name of person or entity, a pseudonym, an alias or a commercial name, although the Disruption Path is probably the more unexpected, the one which breaks usual codes: of naming, of conformity, and so on. It’s possible to disrupt using TRANSLATION inside (rainylondontranslations.com, nakedtranslations.com, …), or not (cucumis.org, proz.com, for instance).

You’ll find all disruptive concepts among the 97,6% of keywords having from 1 to 9 occurrences, and you can consult or download the file here.

I guess most of translation relative domain names to be created using one or more of theses ways. Same rules are worth for taglines, with a mix of all elements above. Last but not least, all keywords may be ... translated!

P.S. For all other characteristics of a short, memorable and easy to spell domain name, never forget the good old rules... See here for taglines.