The Importance Of Domain

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I know I was not going to do more SEO, but a recent conversation regarding domain names came up and it was a topic I had not discussed previously.

A friend was saying that companies in Spain were using .es in domian names rather than .com and suggested that maybe there was more confidence in the Spanish name.

My take was that .com was highly competitive and if they wanted to SERP well in Spain then it made sense that they utilised this as part of the domain as the .com was so well saturated and competition would be less with a minority domain in the country where they are trying to market.  Equally it is harder to SERP well in .com with a local domain.

For example  YapYapOK is a UK domain and ranks on page 1 for Free Classifieds on Google.co.uk.  It does not on Google.com since competition is not only far higher but since .co.uk is part of the domain name.  

We rank on  Google.com page 1 for Free UK Classifieds despite this not being our main anchor or indeed the beginning of our meta data.  This is because Free Classifieds is our main anchor, main meta data and .co.uk is part of the domain name.

It would have been an advantage to be a .com to get to the top Google.om SERP but may have been a mistake for a more local, target market and SERP success in the UK may have been compromised since this would have taken much longer.

Additionally it is an advantage to have the domain name and the site content the same.   FreeClassifieds.com is easy for Google to SERP, it is actually SERP 1, it just belongs to someone else.

Since YapYapOK was originally targeted at the UK we registered the UK domain.  We also bought the local and the .coms for when we roll out elsewhere.

Unless your looking for a global placement, then it makes sense to register a local domain.  You can always register .com too.  That way you can SERP higher locally and spend time getting the .com version well ranked over time.

IMHO

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