My good friend Del Manning, who provides branding and design services, messaged me this week with a question I hear constantly in different forms. His client was setting up a new brand and website, and he wanted to know which of five candidate domains was best from an SEO perspective. He sent over the list. I ran them through Ahrefs, and the honest answer was that none of the five carried any existing SEO value at all. Which turned out to be the useful answer, because it forced the better question: what should a new brand name actually be optimised for?
We talked it through and landed somewhere I believe strongly: when you are naming a company, SEO should be the last criterion on the list. I am not saying that as a branding consultant protecting his lane. I am saying it as someone whose own company name proves the point the painful way.
MageCloud Naming Note
The Test a New Brand Name Has to Pass
THE EXPANSION TEST
Does it survive growth?
The name has to work in new cities, new countries, and new product lines. A name that describes today’s niche is a ceiling, not a foundation.
THE GEOGRAPHY TRAP
No locations in the name
“London” in the brand name feels strong until the franchisee opens in Manchester. The strongest word in the name becomes the wrong word.
THE TECHNOLOGY TRAP
No platforms or tech in the name
I put Magento and cloud hosting into my company name ten years ago. Both were the right bet then. Both are the box I live in now.
Paul Ryazanov · MageCloud · a naming lesson that took ten years to fully price
The Geography Trap, Up Close
Del’s client wanted London in the brand name, and on the surface it was a reasonable instinct. They are based in London. The word carries weight, premium associations, instant geography. For a business that will only ever serve London, it works.
But play the success scenario forward. The business grows. They franchise. The franchisee opens in Liverpool, then Manchester, then considers Edinburgh. Every shopfront now carries the name of a city it is not in. The thing that made the name strong, its specificity, is exactly what makes it wrong everywhere outside the M25. Names get chosen for the business you have and then have to serve the business you build. A name that caps the upside scenario is a bad trade, because the upside scenario is the one you are working towards.
How My Own Name Boxed Me In
About ten years ago we started with magecloud.net. At the time it was a perfect match. We were going deep on Magento, we were building cloud hosting capability, and the name said both things at once. It was descriptive, memorable inside our niche, and easy to rank for the searches that mattered then. By every criterion I knew to apply, it was a strong name.
Ten years later, WooCommerce and especially Shopify dominate large parts of the industry, and we have built genuine capability across SEO, conversion optimisation, and internet marketing well beyond Magento builds. The name fights all of it. MageCloud is so strongly associated with Magento that pivoting the brand perception towards Shopify or WooCommerce work is a permanent uphill walk. The word cloud sets the technology-and-hosting expectation in stone before a prospect reads a single case study. We can do the work. Convincing someone that “these Magento hosting guys” could do something else is the tax the name charges on every new conversation, the same kind of perception problem I see brands fight when trying to stand out in a crowded market.
After ten years of building this name, I will, unfortunately, have to start again with a new one at some point. That sentence cost a decade to be able to write.
Why SEO Is the Wrong Lens for Naming
The SEO argument for descriptive names was always weaker than it looked, and it has aged badly. Exact-match domains stopped being a meaningful ranking advantage years ago. Google ranks brands and content, not keywords stuffed into domains. A made-up word with no search volume, Shopify is one, becomes the highest-value keyword in your niche the moment the business behind it succeeds. Nobody searched for “Shopify” in 2006. The brand created the demand, not the other way round.
What a new brand actually needs from its name is room. Room to expand geographically, room to add product lines, room to pivot when the market moves, because over a ten-year horizon the market will move. The name is the one asset you cannot iterate. You can redesign the site, reposition the messaging, and rebuild the product, but the name is load-bearing from day one, which is why it deserves the kind of strategic thought Del brings to brand work, the kind he presented at Ecommerce Camp UK, rather than an afternoon with a keyword tool.
The Trade-Off I Will Admit To
There is a version of the descriptive-name argument that survives. If you are building a deliberately small, deliberately local business, a lifestyle business with no franchise ambitions and no pivot risk, then a name like “Camden Bike Repairs” is honest, memorable, and converts. The trap only closes on businesses that grow past their name. The uncomfortable part is that nobody starting a company believes they are building the small version. Price the name for the business you are trying to build, not the one you are registering this week.
If You Are Naming Something Right Now
Choose the name that survives every version of your future you can imagine, then let the SEO take care of itself through the content and the work. And if you are sitting with five domain candidates and a keyword tool open, close the tool. If you want to talk through how a name plays out against a long-term ecommerce strategy, come find me at the next Ecommerce Camp UK. Del might be there too, and he is better at this part than I am.