.Com or .gone?

Everyone loves choosing their domain name. It seems like the perfect tool, the global brand, the ultimate symbol that will dot every flyer, brochure, and business card that we will ever be produce. When the time is ripe, the web design agency presiding over the ceremony, loves to pop the question, “.com or .co.uk?”


Without a moment of doubt in that moment of truth, you utter the fateful words, “.com.”


Fateful is the keyword here, so choose well. The main reason that people opt for a ‘.com’ over a ‘co.uk’ domain is due to the perception that the former is grander and the latter is cheap. Many businesses mistakenly assume that ‘co.uk’ is the pale reflection of a 2-man outfit. Yet this cannot be the case because in the real world when you are looking to do business in a particular country, you base yourself in that country. Apply the same strategy to positioning yourself in the online market.


So, if you’re thinking of going global, take advice from the hippies and think local. Ironically both search engines and their users tend to judge the information on your site pretty robotically: if it looks relevant it probably is. For this reason UK search engine indexes tend to privelege ‘.co.uk’ domains over ‘.com’ on the assumption that UK sites are more likely to be based in the UK and therefore more relevant to UK users. Sites with foreign domains are not going to feature highly in country specific search engines and are more likely to be pushed to the bottom of the rankings.


The fact is that there is no ‘.com’ club to belong to unless you want to introject all the hype at your peril. Therefore if you want your site to do business online all you need to be is:

1. top of the search engines
   
2. in front of your market

A domain name is a domain name, and on the search engines they all work the same. Except some are more suitable to your market than others.