Advice to Help You Decide On A Name For Your Yoga or Pilates Business

When you're deciding to launch a new business or service, pondering the name can take hours and hours.... You ask a family member who says they are all great (canny but not helpful!)... You second guess yourself... Go through a phase of trying to be really clever... Then you go simple... Then too generic. Then it becomes too complicated. Then you go back to your original idea. Then you’re convinced they are all terrible and you pause everything…. It's a minefield which leaves you in an existential crisis thinking "who am I?"

This is the advice I would give :

1. Think about what's important to you.

Do you have cultural or heritage ties? Is there a mood you want to evoke? Something symbolic in your journey? Is there a story behind the name? This is about you. Doing work on your value proposition will really help, I have a template on this which is a great place to start.

It’s always better when your name has meaning. You just need to watch an episode of The Apprentice to see that coming up with a random word like “Tenacity” does not result in a strong business! 

A note here, within the yogic tradition, make sure you’re always approaching this from a respectful place. There’s much debate around the appropriation of Namaste for example, and we need to be very mindful as western practitioners that we are honouring yoga and East & South Asian practitioners. I find Susanna Barkataki a great voice on these topics. Eg https://www.instagram.com/reel/CdtGIcYsT_G/ 

2. Is it easy to say and remember?

You need customers to remember the name... If it's too complex or hard to spell, they are less likely to remember it or Google it. Equally something that’s too simple might make it not very memorable. If we think about some of the biggest Yoga, Pilates, Gym businesses names like Triyoga, Pure Gym, Hot Pod - they aren’t overly complex.

3. Is it unique enough?

If you try to name your business something that's a very common word, you're always going to struggle to rank on Google. I'm not saying this is a bad name in theory but if you choose a name like "Relax Yoga" or "Balance Pilates," you will have a hard time ranking for your own name which poses problems when customers want to find you. What I mean by this is, lots of higher ranking website will use these words on their website a lot, so you will be competing against pages with much higher domain authority. 

4. Is the url available?

You'll want to research on a domain website like Go Daddy to see if you can get the domain you want, ideally it would be a .co.uk or.com and not too far from your company name ie I wouldn't have wanted Santosha-marketing-services.info. It's too complicated to remember. Are there other businesses with a very similar domain? That’s not a total deal breaker if they are very small and based somewhere different, but ideally you wouldn’t want to use an identical name as this will pose many problems for you down the road.

5. Is it future proofed?

Do you think you'll add more services in the future and will the name reflect them? Eg if you said Santosha Pilates but you start offering yoga, sound baths and barre.... Does this name still work for you? Likewise if you use your own name like Laura Campbell Yoga... What happens if you expand and bring on more teachers? Does this name still work? I often work with yoga teachers who now offer a broader range of offerings and they worry Laura Campbell Yoga gives too narrow an impression when they are offering breathwork sessions to businesses for example.

This would be my approach to having a company name. 

Like much of marketing and business there isn't a "correct name" but if you've considered all of these potential outcomes you've made a sensible decision and hopefully you manage to find a name that you love that also works well for you now and in the future.