It’s important when you’re investing in your online marketing campaign that you build you campaign around a strong domain name for your business and it’s best that you go for a well-branded website with a well-branded domain name that has a strong domain extension. Now, I just wanna run through some of the different domain extensions that are available out there and just explain what might be the best options for you.
So firstly, obviously the .com is the best option to go for in most cases. If you can get the .com of the brand that you want, that’s the ideal scenery because that allows you to target a worldwide audience. A .com is a strong domain extension that’s recognized and respected by Google and the other search engines. It has the natural advantage over the other domain extensions in most cases.
However, if you’re targeting a specific country, you’d probably be better off going for that country code as opposed to just the .com especially if you’re not looking at any stage to ever expand to a worldwide audience. So going for a .com.au or .co.uk or similar sort of things like .com.ca, these will give you a competitive advantage inside that country code. You can still rank well with a plain .com however it also makes your site more familiar and targeted to the customers in that country.
The other things that are out there, things like .net, .org, .biz, .info and also your .net.au and .org.au and so forth, these really aren’t a very good option to go for at all. You’re better focusing on the .com and the .com.au. The .net and .org are not very good for two reasons. Firstly, the search engines don’t give a lot of weight to those domain names for the search engine results and that sort of thing. So you have a competitive advantage in the search engines if you have a .com or .com.au. But then also from a branding point of view, people don’t remember the .net and the .biz. They’ll type in a .com anyway. It also does not look as appealing to have a .biz. For example, having the .com in your domain name says a lot about your brand. It does give you a stronger impression.
However, from a branding point of view, there are a few of these more obscure domain extensions that can be really good in certain circumstances. So there are things like a .co, .me, .tv and .fm. Now your .tv is good for video blogs and your .fm is really good for podcast. It’s a good branding domain extension. Your .me is good for personal blogs and .co can also be a good option because you can get the right name if the .com’s already taken. It’s short and people remember it. However, just be aware that if you are gonna go for those sort of domain extensions that are old country codes, they actually are not gonna rank very well in the search engines. You’re far better off if you are looking at getting organic rankings, doing SEO, go for a .com or a .com.au or whatever country code you might be targeting with your online marketing campaign.