As a part of their Adwords product, Google actually provides estimates of the monthly search traffic that specific search terms receive. This is a very powerful tool and accessing the tool is free, all you have to do is register for a free account. Once you have logged in the keyword tool can be accessed by going to "tools and analysis" and then "keyword planner".

After typing "Lake Gaston" into the keyword tool, and then selecting the "keyword ideas" tab, I get an estimate of the number of searches that search term gets per month, as well as search terms that Google feels are related to "Lake Gaston". It looks like this:

For our purposes of choosing a domain name, we can ignore everything but the search term (ie lake gaston north carolina) and the average monthly searches, as the rest of the data relates to paid search terms which we are going to get into later.

Also, I want to focus only on the most highly trafficked keywords for now, as my research at this stage is only related to choosing the domain name. With this in mind the following terms jump out at me:

• Lake Gaston 5400 searches a month
• Lake Gaston NC 1900
• Lake Gaston Rentals 1900
• Lake Gaston Real Estate 1600

Next I go over to the Godaddy's domain search tool and search for each of these keywords as a domain (so LakeGaston.com, LakeGastonnc.com, etc.). While it would be great for a real estate company to have any of these names, unfortunately all of them have been taken.

Since I still want to have "Lake Gaston" in my domain name, I decided to use the combination of the firms initials with Lake Gaston and luckily lcrlakegaston.com was open and I was able to register it with Godaddy (like I do all my domain names) on that same page for $8.19 . Ideally, we would like the domain name to be as short as possible to make it easier for people to remember and type it in without mistakes.

So now that I have my domain name. its time to choose my content management platform which we will cover in the next section.