Know Thy Region

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4. SEO & Competition Analysis – Part One
5. Google Proof Your Site with Links

Before picking your company’s URL, you’ll need to consider your market: are you aiming for a regional client base or an international one? Especially given the fierce competition for the .com, .org and .net TLDs, registering a regional domain name can certainly save you money. And if your target clients are local, it could also earn you more business.

One reason for this is that using a regional domain name (like .uk or .ca) advertises your local connection, and this may earn you the loyalty of customers in your area. However, there is a specific, tangible advantage to using a regional domain: it allows your site to be picked up by domain filtering search engines.

Essentially, domain filtering search engines pick up only those sites that belong to specific regional domains, effectively offering French-only searches, Australian-only searches, and so on. If most (or all) of your client base belongs to a particular region, these search engines may prove to be an invaluable source of new customers.

However, domain filters are far from perfect, their chief drawback being that they exclude local sites with top-level domain names. Although many region-specific search engines also scan a constantly updated list of local sites with TLDs, the inefficiency of this method means that many sites slip through the cracks - and it certainly doesn’t help that some countries, like Tuvalu, Tonga, and Ascension Island, have put their domain names up for sale. Indeed, the vast majority of Web surfers seem reluctant to use region-specific search engines.

So is a regional domain name ever better than a TLD? Possibly. If you have no intention of expanding your business to an international scope, you might benefit from targeting your market niche. On the other hand, let’s face it: .ca, .nz, or .au just don’t look as good as .net, .org, or .com. As the latest raft of TLDs is introduced, this may change … but for now, that .ie domain name may just make your company look like small potatoes.