When you buy a domain name for your business, the bit at the end ( .com / .co.uk / .net / etc.) is known as the TLD (short for Top Level Domain) and businesses have traditionally gone with either the .com or .co.uk to give their business that feeling of "quality" on the internet.
But times changed.
The .biz TLD was introduced 20 years ago but was never as popular as the associated .com address. The reason for this is simple: If you typed an incomplete web address into a web browser, the browser would try to append various TLDs to the end of it to try and get you to the correct website. Which TLD did your browser always try first? That's right: the .com address. So businesses bought the .com addresses to make themselves the first ones that you would find. Anything other than a .com address was considered a distant second in terms of popularity.
Times have moved on a lot further now.
A whole raft of new TLDs are now available and so many of them are specific to industries and sectors rather than being a generic "business" address. For example, SquareCubed could now register a domain name with the .support TLD making the web site address: squarecubed.support and there are so many more to choose from: .academy, .accountants, .digital, .engineering, .plumbing, .support, .trade and so on.
One perceived problem is that some of these new TLDs are often associated with spam email origins or feel like a 'novelty' or are maybe even taking a hit on SEO search rankings. Whilst the last is definitely not true (according to Google), the perception can still be stuck in the head of the end user.
So do you just play it safe and go for the .com or .co.uk address or do you look for something more unique and more targeted towards your business identity, to what your business does and to your target audience?
Kommentare