What is a vanity URL?
A vanity URL, a custom URL, or a branded URL is a unique web address customized to feature your brand name or keywords related to your business. It is an easy-to-remember and aesthetically pleasing alternative to the generic URLs generated by default.
These URLs serve as the digital welcome mat for your online presence, leaving a lasting impression on visitors and ensuring that your brand, message, or content remains memorable.
Obtaining a vanity URL is easy, but its impact can be significant. Whether you’re an individual looking to establish a personal brand or a business seeking to enhance its online identity, a vanity URL offers a unique opportunity to stand out.
5 Benefits of using a vanity URL
Vanity URLs are more than just a shortened link. They offer a variety of benefits that can improve your online presence and marketing strategies. Here are some top benefits of using vanity URLs:
Increase brand awareness
Create a consistent and recognizable online presence by directly incorporating your brand name or relevant keyword into your custom domain
. Consistency reinforces your brand identity, making it more memorable for your audience. When users see your custom vanity URL, they are more likely to associate it with your brand, increasing trust and recognition.
Increase trust
The fact that you are willing to attach your brand name to the content you’re sharing tells followers that your link won’t redirect them to spam or phishing sites an that the content you are linking them to is relevant to them and will be consistent with your brand. This increased trust can improve CTR (click-through rate) by up to 39% when compared to generic short URLs or long unbranded links.
Improve SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical for driving organic traffic to your website. Vanity URLs can be optimized with relevant keywords, making it easier for search engines, like Google, to index your content. When users search for those keywords, your vanity URL is more likely to appear in search results, boosting your website’s overall SEO ranking.
Increase link management control
Custom domains and branded links give businesses better control over their link management. They allow for easy tracking and monitoring of link performance. Businesses can effortlessly update, redirect, or modify their vanity URLs to align with changing marketing campaigns or objectives. This flexibility ensures that your links remain relevant and effective over time.
Integrated link retargeting and UTM tools
You can add people who click on your links to your retargeting lists, even if that link leads to a third-party website. It can increase your top of funnel traffic by 500%. You can also attach UTM parameters to your URL before shortening it, making tracking traffic and conversions generated from your vanity URLs easier.
For a more in-depth look at the benefits of vanity URLs, read our blog post on branded links vs. short links.
How do I create a vanity URL?
A vanity URL is composed of three sections. Your branded short domain, TLD, and URL slug.
For example: rebrand.ly/vanityurl
Short domain: rebrand
TLD: .ly
URL slug: vanityurl
Here’s how you can create your vanity URL:
Step 1: Choose a domain name
Your domain name should reflect your business to keep your branding consistent and allow people to identify the link as yours.
This is the hardest part of the process for many people. If this is proving difficult, check out our guide on finding the best branded short domain for your vanity URLs.
Step 2: Choose a TLD
Choose a relevant TLD (top level domain). While .com is the most popular and widely recognized TLD, numerous alternatives are available. You might opt for a more specific TLD, depending on your content or brand.
Some examples include:
- .link
- .click
- .lol
- .news
- .bio
Rebrandly offers over 500 TLDs to choose from, starting at just $2.
The choice of TLD can impact the perception of your website. Choose a TLD that aligns with your website’s purpose and target audience.
At Rebrandly, we assign different TLDs based on the type of content we’re sharing. For example we have:
- Rebrandly.news -We use this for Rebrandly news and media mentions
- Rebrandly.rocks – We use this for Rebrandly sharing links to users’ reviews
- Rebrandly.live – We use this to share links to Facebook Live and webinars
- Rebrandly.blog – We use this to share our blog posts
- Rebrandly.link – We use this to share curated content
- Rebrandly.xyz – We use this for general and funny sharing
If you don’t have a domain name yet, check if the one you want is still available and how much it costs using our domain search tool.
Step 3: Incorporate a URL Slug with a Keyword
Once you choose your custom domain name and TLD, you can create vanity URLs. The slug is one of the most important parts of a URL as it tells people what the link will be about.
This is often not possible in generic short URLs as the URL generator will attach random letters that come across as cryptic. With a vanity URL, you get to decide what the slug will say.
A custom slug helps users understand the link before they click and can improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) by including keywords that people might use when searching for related content. Ensure the URL slug is concise, descriptive, and free of special characters or spaces.
Once you add a domain to Rebrandly, it will be saved to your account so you can use it to create vanity URLs. Our Chrome Extension, iOS app, and Android App can make this process even faster.
Best practices for using vanity URLs
Branded links build trust and can help you achieve your marketing goals.
Here are the best practices to follow when you are using a vanity URL or a branded link:
Use vanity URLs for aesthetics, branding, and tracking
You don’t have to use a vanity URL for every link you share. The purpose of a vanity URL is to make a link shorter and associated with your brand. If a link already achieves this purpose, it is unnecessary to change it again. However, if you’re using a URL shortener for analytics or link management, a few extra seconds spent editing your link will be worth it to keep all link data in one place.
Use clear wording
Always clearly display your brand and use full words to describe your content. For people to trust your link, they need to know where the link will bring them.
Make sure all parts of your link are optimized for clarity and that you are using a descriptive URL slug. Use the publication’s name if you’re linking to a third-party website. Be honest, straightforward, and as concise as possible.
Keep your link short and memorable
One of the primary purposes of vanity URLs is to make links easy to remember and type. When creating a new vanity URL, opt for simplicity. Short, concise URLs are more user-friendly and have a higher chance of being retained by your audience. Avoid using complex strings of characters or symbols as parts of the URL, as they can confuse potential visitors.
Reflect your brand
The essence of vanity URLs lies in link branding. Ensure that your vanity URL is aligned with your brand identity. Ideally include your company name, product, or a relevant keyword that associates it with your brand. Consistency in branding across all online channels is key to building trust and recognition.
Track and analyze performance
Utilize analytics tools to monitor the performance of your vanity URLs. Track metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and user behavior on the landing page. This data can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, allowing you to make necessary adjustments.
How vanity URLs can help your website’s SEO
When creating a site an often overlooked essential step is planning your site structure. Your site structure is all about how the pages on your site are connected but it can be difficult to know if you should use sub-domains, sub-directories or even use multiple domains.
There’s a lot of conflicting information out there about how your site should be structured and it’s a big factor in your SEO ranking so you need to get it right. Kissmetrics do a great job of explaining just why your site structure is so important and how you can go about creating a site structure that will help improve your SEO.
The challenge is that you want to choose a domain name and website structure that helps your SEO ranking but you also want a simple, easy to share domain name that fits your brand. This is where Vanity URLs can help. Today I want to show you how you can optimize your website structure for both search engines and human beings.
Website structure basics
Before we get into how Vanity URLs come into the SEO equation let’s cover some of the basics of website structure. There are lots of different ways a website can be structured but a straightforward structure looks something like this:
There’s the main homepage that branches into subpages and these can branch into even further pages.
One of the challenges you’ll face when structuring your site is that it’s likely many of your pages will mention the same keyword or phrase. This means these pages are in competition with each other to rank in Google and your website is in competition with itself. As intelligent as Google is it can’t read minds (yet!) so it can be unsure which page you want to rank for a keyword or phrase.
Let’s take the example of a marketing agency that has a main homepage and subpages for each service that they offer. Their main service offering that brings in the most income is web design. But they also offer other services like market research, event management and social media management.
Following SEO best practices for their website structure, they create a homepage on www.FireAgency.com and use sub-pages for their different service offerings. Ideally, they would like their homepage to appear whenever someone searches for any of “web design”, “event management” or “SEO optimization” management but this isn’t so easy in practice.
Instead, they focus their homepage on the keyword “web design” since this is their main revenue stream and they create subpages for their event management and social media management services.
It’s important that they don’t have pages competing with each other to rank for keywords so they don’t create a subpage for web design services.
They now have a website structure that looks loosely like the image below:
This site is now structured in a way that will help them to rank organically using different sub-pages targeting different keywords. While these pages look good for search engines they’re not so great for sharing with humans whether it’s online with an awkward UTM added to the end or offline where people have no hope of remembering and typing them in.
Enter the hero of our story, Vanity URLs.
Vanity URLs and SEO
Vanity URLs are appealing looking links that redirect that use your brand name and redirect to a less appealing link using a 301 redirect. For example, if our fictitious agency, Fire, wanted to share a link to their event management page that included UTM parameters so they could track the traffic from this like it would look something like:
https://www.fireagency.com/event-management?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=christmas_sale
But instead we can create a short clean vanity URL with the UTM parameters hidden that looks like:
Fire.Agency/Events
The top-level-domain (TLD) from the original link which is most commonly .com or .net is replaced in our vanity URL by .agency which is one of the new gTLDs. This TLD is relevant to their industry and looks neat and tidy. You can choose this as well as a ton of other TLDs starting from $2.00 on Rebrandly.
It also gives us the ability to associate our link with different keywords and we can even create a number of links that lead to the same destination which can be used for different purposes.
There’s a common misconception that redirecting a link in this way can hurt your SEO. Vanity URLs are simply used for sharing a clean, tidy and branded link that brings visitors to a less appealing URL. They’re not cataloged by Google in the first place and are not intended to rank organically so there is no issue with using a vanity URL.
The main difference between these two links is that our vanity URL can be easily shared because it is pronounceable and memorable. This is how vanity URLs help with your websites SEO. You don’t have to compromise on having a good site structure vs having an easy to share link, you can have both.
Fire marketing agency has a homepage on www.fireagency.com and now has two long subpages to deal with, www.fireagency.com/event-management and www.fireagency.com/SEO-Optimization.
They can use the domain Fire.Agency to create vanity URLs that link to their site. So they create a vanity URL ‘Fire.Agency/Events’ that directs people to their event management subpage and ‘Fire.Agency/SEO’ directs people to their SEO optimization subpage. They could even redirect Fire.Agency to their homepage if they wanted to.
This way they’re not compromising any SEO juice by keeping their links short and snappy but they can also easily share these links with people both online and offline in a way that looks good. (Sidenote, The Fire.Agency domain is currently available!)
Where to use your vanity URL
Now that Fire Agency has a clean vanity URL there are a number of places it can be used to make it easier for visitors to get to their site. Below are just some examples of how they could use their vanity URL.
Social Media: Some social media platforms automatically shorten your link using their own domain. Twitter, for example, shortens links to http://t.co. By using your vanity URL on these social media platforms you can keep your brand name prominent which helps provide clarity as to where this link is leading and increase trust. We’ve found that these factors help to increase click-through-rate by up to 39%.
Promotional Materials: It can be difficult to report the return of offline marketing materials like flyers, posters or even product packaging. By using a vanity URL on these marketing materials you can easily track how many visits on your site were a direct result of these materials.
You can also add UTM parameters to your links so you can track this performance in Google Analytics to consolidate all of your reporting.
SMS Messages: Text message marketing campaigns have increased in popularity recently.
By using a vanity URL in these campaigns you not only increase your brand exposure and create a generally tidier text message but can easily track the success of your campaign in driving traffic to your site.
Boost performance with vanity URLs
With the ability to enhance trust, vanity URLs are a great way to encourage more people to click on your links. They can boost your performance across your marketing campaigns effectively. Rebrandly lets you create short URLs with your brand domain and custom slugs to support your branding efforts.