How Domain Research Can Help Your Business Succeed!
With the massive growth of the internet worldwide, more and more companies are moving their brick and mortar business online, or sometimes even skipping the traditional route and opting for a purely online presence; Amazon, Uber, MakeMyTrip being some classic examples. The web has opened a plethora of opportunities for businesses but, at the same time, it has also become a playground for a lot of malicious entities who try to exploit businesses, small and large alike.
Domain names are also the basic starting point for businesses for the operation of cyber criminals. And hence every person or organization creating their brand online must ensure that their own domain and the other online businesses they are dealing with are not connected with fraud. Information is the key to everything good and bad that takes place online. In this blog, we will be discussing how you can access crucial information on online entities not only to keep your business safe but also so as to help your business grow.
To research domain names, one of the prime sources of information can be found in its registration details, also known as WHOIS record. Whenever anyone registers a domain name, they have to provide the registrar with some identifying and contact information such as:
- Name
- Email address
- Phone number
- City
- Postal code
- State
- Country
This information must be available for four types of domain contact: Registrant, Billing, Technical, and Administrative. Besides this, the WHOIS record also contains crucial technical information like the registrar information, registration date, update date, and expiry date, and name servers.
While WHOIS records can be a great tool to access information about a single domain, however, if you have only the name of the organization or its owner and not the actual domain name, then you can opt for a Reverse WHOIS search. This can help you search for all the domains for any specific domain registration information available in the WHOIS record including registrant name, email phone, location details, etc. Some advanced Reverse WHOIS search tools also allow you to do fuzzy searches, wherein you can search for a keyword which is a part of all the registered domain name.
It can indeed be fascinating to know how much can be learned about an organization from this basic information alone. By combining this data with many other pieces of information, a bigger picture can be drawn that can help businesses in their online endeavors.
Some ways that this information can help businesses:
New Domain Registrations
If you are keen on a domain name which is already taken, you can always look up its WHOIS to find its owner and probably make an offer he cannot refuse! Also, before registering a domain name, verifying its prior domain ownership details can be very beneficial for businesses. It also helps to check the historic WHOIS records of a domain name to ensure that it is not related to any malicious entities or malpractices.
Marketing Research
Reverse WHOIS can be a great research tool for businesses. Say you want to find all the websites in Chicago, you can easily find domain names that have the keyword ‘Chicago’ in it, as well as, domains that are registered in Chicago. Companies can find suitable partners or new business opportunities with the help of Reverse WHOIS.
Partner Profiling
A Reverse WHOIS report will show you all domains that a potential partner holds. You will have access to all of this information which can be used to dig deeper and identify if the partner has any ties to illegal websites or malicious domains.
While it is important to know more about your partners, it is also important to find out if you end up getting associated with malicious domains. This can happen when hackers try to operate malicious domains through your network. They may use a breach to collect sensitive information from your network and may even create financial setbacks for you.
Keeping An Eye On Your Competition
Since Reverse WHOIS lets you look up all the domains for search terms found in the WHOIS record, you can easily search for domains registered under your competitor’s name, organization name, email or any other identifying/connected term. This can sometimes also help you to know of their new business undertakings before official announcements are made as well! Also, you can find all your competitors in a particular location where you are planning to conduct your business by filtering your searches for that place.
Identify Brand, Copyright Or Trademark Infringement
Protect your brand from counterfeiters who try to disrepute your valuable brand name and also eat up on your revenue. When you find any infringing website, you can check its WHOIS records to find the owner details or the registrar with whom the domain is registered, and take legal action against them. By using reverse WHOIS, you can also find if the owner has other websites or is using your brand/ trademark keywords for other domain names as well.
WHOIS and Reverse WHOIS can be an extremely useful tool for organizations to collect different types of intelligence. It is helpful for identity lookups, finding domain names in a particular region, contact information of online merchants, new domains registered by competition or even to prevent fraud! But to successfully research domains, companies need to ensure that they are getting their information from a comprehensive database, like that of Whoisology, with over 5 billion WHOIS records covering over 2,850 TLDs (numbers don’t lie now!). Whoisology is geared to help companies understand their digital landscape and also can be doubled up as a security tool! Our web tool also makes this research very easy and visual, go ahead and get a trial account and you will agree with us! Access free trial here: https://whoisology.com/register