ICDL Digital Marketing (ICDL): Choosing a domain when the obvious one is gone

Choose marisolvegabookkeeping.com.

Reasoning:

• It matches the name she is already referred by. Her entire pipeline is word of mouth: a builder tells another builder "ask for Marisol Vega". A domain that spells that name is the one that gets typed correctly after a phone conversation or read from a business card. mvbookkeeping.co requires the visitor to know an abbreviation she has never used.
• .com is the default assumption for people who are not online specialists. Her audience is construction firm owners, not marketers.
• 22 characters is acceptable when it is a person's name; the length objection mainly applies to invented brand names.
• Reject the hyphenated version: it must be explained verbally ("with hyphens") and is easily mistyped.
• Reject marisolbooks.com: near-identical to an existing bookshop at .net, in a different country and sector. The confusion risk - for her and for the bookshop's customers - plus potential trademark exposure outweighs a shorter name. A domain that suggests she sells books is actively misleading for a bookkeeping practice.

Budget fit: a .com registration is a small annual cost, leaving the bulk of €600 for the site itself.

The site's only job is to convert a referred, already-warm visitor into a phone call or enquiry. Everything else is optional.

Must have:

• One clear sentence stating what she does and for whom ("Bookkeeping for small construction firms in [region]").
• Phone number visible on every screen, tappable on mobile.
• A short "who I work with" section naming construction - this is her qualification signal and her differentiator.
• Services and indicative pricing or pricing approach; trade clients dislike mystery.
• Credentials and a brief note on confidentiality and compliance, which is what construction owners actually worry about.
• Working contact form plus email, and a mobile-responsive layout - most referrals will be looked up on a phone.

Deliberately leave out:

• A blog she will not maintain (an abandoned blog is worse than none).
• Complex booking or client portals in year one.
• Stock photography of people in suits pretending to be accountants.

Build approach: a well-configured template or hosted site builder, not a custom build - €600 does not buy custom, and she cannot maintain it.

Because her volume is small, measurement must be simple and honest.

Set a baseline first. Before launch, record how many enquiries per month arrive and how: phone, Facebook message, referral. Without a baseline, any later number is meaningless.

Track three things only:

1. Enquiries per month from the contact form and phone, recorded in one spreadsheet.
2. Ask every new enquiry "how did you find me?" - at her volume, asking beats analytics. It catches the referral chain that no dashboard can see.
3. A simple visit count and a look at which pages people reach, to check that referred visitors are finding the contact details rather than leaving.

Define success in advance: for example, three additional qualified enquiries a month within six months would repay the build. If enquiries have not moved by month six, the problem is more likely to be the offer or the referral flow than the website, and the next euro should go there rather than into a redesign.

Watch for the silent failure: a site that gets visits but no calls usually means the phone number is hard to find on mobile, not that the design is ugly.