EngineWorks

A well-defined domain name can provide tremendous advantages for an online business, including the added benefit of boosting performance in the search engines. Simple, easily-recognized domains convey professionalism and trust to search engine users. Just as important, however, is the fact that businesses can extend their reach in the search engines through a generic domain name, or through a domain that uses a country specific extension (see Country Code Top Level Domains below) to provide localized results to potential customer.

Country Code Top Level Domains (CCTLDs)

Google and other search engines have several Web sites for each country code, such as google.co.uk or google.co.in. These specific domains have been created for localized search, and in many cases they are the “dot-com” for search engine users in the respective countries. When searching through a country specific search engine domain, many times the results returned will include Web sites that are feature similar CCTLD domains, such as “domain.co.uk”. Astute search marketing firms that identify this situation can employ the effective strategy of using a CCTLD domain in order to achieve prominent positions within highly-targeted local search engines, and capture incremental qualified traffic.

Longer Is Sometimes Better For Conversions

Domain names are often thought to be less valuable if they include more than two or three words. However, this is not always the case in the search marketing world. Longer domain names tend to be significantly more specific than short domains. For example, “homeloan.com” may be succinct; however it is also very generic. Whereas the longer domain name “portlandmortgageloan.com” defines the type of loan and the geographical location.

Shorter domains may receive a greater quantity of traffic, but not necessarily greater converting traffic. Longer domains might receive fewer visitors per day, but the advantage is that the owner of the domain names knows that those visitors are looking for something very specific. You can then provide content and implement lead conversion strategies that take advantage of your increased understanding of the visitor’s needs.

Search Engine Rankings – Brand Trust

Companies can fortify their brand, and gain new business, by building trust through a generic domain name. As an example, Bank of America owns the domain “loans.com”. The company could chose to use this domain name separate from its primary domain to build-out a loan information site. This strategy could achieve prominent rankings in the search engines by leveraging this extremely generic domain name with their business model of providing several types of loans to consumers. This would be an effective strategy due to the fact that consumers tend to bestow a significant amount of trust a very generic domain such as “loans.com”.