Domain name. what to use? .ie .com etc

whitesheep

I'm choosing a domain name at the moment. we will be tradining in ireland & the uk serving customers in France Spain UK and Italy. the domain name i want is available in .ie, .es, .fr but not .co.uk or .it. how important is it to have exactly the same domain name in each territory?

what s the story with .UK.com is it just a different version of .co.uk? does it mean anything for SEO?

Should I keep going till I find a domain name that fits perfectly for each country.

Thanks in advance.
Whitesheep

eliterank

Go for a .com and use a hreflang.

whitesheep

thanks

.com not available either. What is hreflang

mneylon

uk.com isn't a "proper" domain extension so it's not going to be as well recognised by Google etc.,

If you can't get the domain name in the country code you're targeting does this mean that a competitor has it already?

If so you'd probably be better off using a different name entirely.

re: hreflang: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

betakrea

In simple words, Hreflang is a way to tell Google that a page is targeted for a language/country.

When choosing a domain name consider the long run.

What's the difference?
Local domains (aka ccTLD, Country Code Top-Level Domain) such as ie, co.uk, de, it tend to better rank for the relevant country. This is not an absolute truth but it's true most of the times.

Many factors are related to that, the brand awareness, the backlink profile, the content etc.
A ie domain is great for an Irish audience: technically speaking as well as the searcher perspective. As a person who lives in Ireland, I prefer a ie domain, it gives me more trust.

You have, more or less, 2 possibilities:
1- Register multiple domains (ie, co.uk, de, ...).
A localised domain helps with the users' trust but you need much more technical resources, each website needs its own authority.

2- Register a dot com domain. One single website to work on, one domain to create authority on, subfolder/subdomain for each market.

If I'd start a project today, I'd definitely go for a dot com domain. The main reason is that I can work on a single domain name and increase it's authority with multiple activities, with a ccTLD I'd need to do the same (ish) work on each domain.

There're exceptions. The main one is how the local markets work. Besides a proper market analysis, which you need to perform to start the whole project, I'd suggest you 2 SEO related tasks:

1. Check the results in Google. Look what kind of websites come up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Use a number of queries related to your market and see which sites/pages you get.
Are all the sites dot de in Germany, dot fr in France, dot it in Italy? You should consider using ccTLD.
Are the results a mix of local domains and generic Top Level Domains (gTLD such as dot com, net, org, edu, etc)? You can go with a .com domain.
Look for isearchfrom to for localised searches

2. Go for a localised - not translation - help. Find if locals are willing to convert (read your articles, buy, provide you with their email, etc) with local domains or generic ones. What's their perception on this?

I wrote enough, feel free to ask. (Even my answer is a little bit late...)




Cheers