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The Latest on Domains

What You Need to Know

Do domain names really matter? Not really. A lot of times, your domain name doesn’t have to be related to your business name. Take our marketing newsletter website for example, rome.marketing. We wanted the site to cater to people in Rome, Georgia looking for marketing help. The fact that it’s operating under Romega Digital is not as important.

Historically we’ve been using things like .com, .org, .net, among others. However, new top level domains (TLDs) offer new possibilities. TLDs like .engineering, .cafe, and .band allow you to easily distinguish your brand and the market you serve. These can also help you stand out against everyone else racing for the .com.

Additionally, it could shorten your domain name considerably. For example, you might recognize our website as romegadigital.com, but we also own romega.digital. We could have launched with that and made it our primary domain. We may eventually switch to it, but at the time, the TLD .digital just launched and people would not easily recognize it on our marketing materials as a website. Thankfully, our .com was available as well. You may not be as fortunate to find an equivalent .com now, and we’ll talk a little later on how that is mattering less and less.

If you’re in a trade where users manually type out your email address often, having a common TLD might be important. This will change as people are used to new TLDs, but right now, people are used to .com. So, find one of those if you can. If you can’t find a .com that suits your business, I’d suggest staying away from the TLDs that look really similar to .com’s – like .co – and lean into the newer form of TLDs. In our experience, a lot more people will mess up a .co domain versus one of the new TLDs.

To make my case, consider your customer’s journey – how did they find your business? (Or, how do you find most sites?) Most of the time, users locate sites through search engines. You’ve probably heard a lot about SEO – this is where it’s king. SEO is the practice of creating good content in a way that’s engaging for your users and readable to the search engines. If your website has good SEO, your website is set up in a way that search engines can read it effectively. That’s why the hunt for the perfect domain doesn’t matter that much.

Remember, search engines are dumb. They don’t know what your header picture means or what services you offer unless there’s supporting text in the code that it can read and process. Not to mention, they don’t know what your domain means, either! Search engines are looking deeper than that.

Regardless, people are finding you through search. If you’re not ranking well, there’s ways to fix that. We had a customer not even on the first two pages of Google, they’re now in the #1 spot.

As Ricky Bobby would say, if you’re not first, you’re last. I’m pretty sure he was talking about search results, because there’s hard data to show the first few spots of google are super valuable to your business and the rest simply do not matter. Check out the graph below. Result 11 starts on page 2 of Google and gets close to 0% of the traffic.

In closing, explore new TLD possibilities. Don’t fret about the domain itself. Just focus more on your SEO and content.

If you need help with finding a domain for your business, or SEO to get your current domain ranking higher, shoot me an email by clicking the button below.

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