Is having domai other than .com a bad marketing?

Hey guys.

Not sure and im slightly confused how to go ahead. Im in the process of setting up a startup and Im looking for a domain which fits my company name. However there's a problem.

Lucky enough I have the company name available to be registered as limited company. However I dont have the .com domain. Instead .uk. I live in the UK and the company is based in the uk. And therefore .uk might fit well. However im not entirely sure.

Ofcourse plans to expand in the future is on the card and when the time comes I could find an opportunity to either find domain to the country im expanding to?

But my question is having a top level domain other than .com a bad strategy? And does it mean when it comes search engines we wont be on top of the search results, because search engines predominantly search the .com?

Like what amazon do - they have a domain for each amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr, amazon.it

Thanks

I think there used to be a porn site called domai XD

I'd like to apologize for this state of affairs as I really feel like this is the US's fault. If I were you, I would buy the .uk domain and/or the .co.uk domain. On the bright side though, the .co.uk top-level domain is much more commercially acceptable than .us ones: here, there is a strong implication that those sites are government related. It's either a library or some weird department website linked from a .gov website. The viability of your national top-level domain is different.

I still think it is important to own .com but that's really just because I'm from the US. It doesn't hurt to have both if you've got the money.

I don't know the state of .uk domains. But usually national domains are more expensive. A whole lot more in some countries. So you need to check that. And to make matters worse, I don't think you can get an .uk domain, and will have to go with the co.uk one.

As far as marketing is concerned, there is little to worry. As whiteflags implied, the .com domain is a mess. Like .net, .gov, .org and the original top level domains, it should have never been created in the first place and there's nowadays absolutely no control whatsoever over them, with what I can only call a black market economy holding the whole domain hostage. When I allowed my quiettech.com domain back in 1999 to expire, little I knew that 2 weeks later when I tried to get it back, It was already on the hands of a company asking me 2,000 USD to give it back.

So, there really is no shame in not having a .com domain, and few companies worry with that these days. And trying to be creative with a company name so that you can get hold of a domain name is the wrong way of doing things.

.co.uk is perfectly ok and an expected domain for businesses located in uk. Of course, you'll have to swallow the toad and buy a domain at premium price because no reason whatsoever. Such is this god forsaken internet these days. But grab it now. It's only bound to get worse. It never got better.

Simple answer: No.

From an internet marketing standpoint there are really only three significant "values" related to a domain name: Being easy to remember/type. Mnemonic association with your market or brand building. Value in search engines as keywords.

Being easy to remember/type mostly matters if you are going to do offline marketing. If you have radio spots that mention your site it is valuable that you can say something like "Visit sitename" and have "sitename" be something that listeners can remember easily and be confident in how it is spelled. This mostly matters for the portion of the domain other than the TLD because somelongsetofwords.com is harder to remember/type than word.com.

It is true that the ".com" association with the internet is high enough that it is possible for people to sometimes hear "somesite.uk" and later try to type "somesite.com" out of a sort of learned reflex but from what I have experienced, this is not very significant.

It's much more important to have a memorable name before the dot than to ensure the TLD is .com as opposed to .uk. If you sold widgets you would be a fool to choose wesellwidgets.com rather than widgets.uk.

And that leads to the second value. Mnemonic association with your market/brand is a much more important issue. Yes, if you sell widgets it might be great to have widgets.uk but if your company is branding itself as "widGee TM" you might choose widGee.com over widgets.uk, but in practice if both names were available you would get both and have widgets.uk redirect to widGee.com. The goal in that case is a long term desire to make it so that when people think of widgets they naturally think widGee.

As for search engines, it is true that search engines pay attention to the domain in terms of keywords, but only in the same sense that they pay attention to the entire URI. I've seen no solid evidence that something like widgets.com/widgets.html would fair significantly better than widGee.com/widgets.html would.

As for the TLD in regards search engines, Google claims that it shows no preference to any TLD over any other, but it does indicate that for some "geo-specific TLDs" that it might consider those MORE relevant to a given area. But this is not a negative in your case, only a positive. Google won't consider your site less relevant in results for US users, but MIGHT consider it MORE relevant to UK users.

Okay, now that I said all that, I need to say that all of that is insignificant in comparison to the importance of all the other marketing concerns you will have.

First, most people aren't going to be typing your domain into a browser they will be clicking on a link somewhere. Whether it is a link on search engine results page, a blog posting, or what have you nobody needs to remember how to type it. Getting the rankings in the search engines or getting people to link to your site (Both of which are feedback related to each other) is so much vastly more important than the issue of .uk vs .com that you really just shouldn't worry about it.

Focus on good content for your site, with relevant keywords in titles, h1 tags, URIs, etc., and getting links into your site from other sites. That is what is going to matter most.

I hope that helps.

Thanks very much all. I really appreciate it.

and thanks TechnoGourmet for the detailed explanation of your thoughts :) Much appreciated.

my answer is NO. I have not pick your domain yet, please read this article, it might help you : How to Pick the Right Domain Name and Extension

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MutantJohn

I think there used to be a porn site called domai XD

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I wouldn't go so far as to call it porn. More like artistic nudes.