Should You Purchase Other TLDs?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Your domain name is very important. It is a brandable item and should be used with great care and forethought. Your domain name should align directly with your company and business goals. It is used more than for search engine optimization, it is your entire brand online. There are times when you might want to purchase domain names that cross over into multiple TLDs and then there are times when you shouldn’t bother.

Let’s say that you are starting a new business in the UK and you purchase the domain name newbusiness.com. Should you also purchase newbusiness.co.uk?

There are plenty of reasons why you should. If you know that your business will operate primarily in the UK then having the regional TLD will benefit you. You could redirect one of the domains to the other or build two websites and increase your chances of ranking in the search engines for your search terms – just don’t use duplicate content!

The dot com TLD has a lot of potential to rank worldwide for your search terms, but it may be easier to go for the regional rankings instead. In fact, one strategy is to build two sites – one that targets your region and the other that is focused globally. When you start to rank in your local region for your important keywords then you can take advantage of those rankings by capitalizing on them. When your business grows to an extent that the business you get from outside your region matches that from within your region then you can redirect your regional TLD to the dot com site and keep on trucking.

That’s just one strategy. Here’s another:

You are starting a business in the U.S. that will have a global outreach, but you know your business will remain a small business forever. Should you snag up every newbusiness dot TLD on the planet? Probably not. That could get costly. But a multinational corporation with a presence on every continent might want to do just that.

What’s the moral? Analyze your business goals. If you are a regional business that you see may expand into a global outreach some day, buy up the dot com and the regional TLD for your site’s name and focus on regional sales until you deem it is prudent to go global. If you are starting out globally but staying small then don’t bother with regional TLDs unless you think you may run into copyright or trademark issues.