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​​​​​Your Domain name doesn’t matter for SEO

The domain name that you use doesn’t matter when it comes to search engine optimisation or acquiring organic search traffic.

When thinking about a domain name, you don’t need to worry about what that domain name ends in. Whether its a .com, an .xyz or org.uk, it really doesn’t matter.

It really doesn’t matter anymore. Google’s job is to provide the most relevant search results, and to do that, all the information and content on your page has to be relevant to that search.

You also need your off-site metrics to be absolutely bang-on, too, so your ‘domain rating‘, or the ‘domain authority’, is very important. This is calculated by where your backlinks are coming from and how relevant and trusted they are.

All that needs to be taken into account when you’re thinking about what domain name you want to buy is whether you like it!

Does Domain Name Matter for SEO

Is A .com Better Than A .co.uk Or .guru?

When it comes to what your domain name ends in, or as we call it, the top level domain, it really doesn’t matter.

All you need to think about is what it looks like to the user. Up until very recently, a lot of people wouldn’t really have seen many websites ending with a .io TLD. Now, every technology company that’s worth they’re weight have a website that ends in .io – they’re everywhere.

Nowadays it’s more and more common that you’ll find in the search results a website that ends with a .london, or another type of top level domain.

When it comes to search engine optimisation, there are three crucial areas that you need to address, rather than what the domain name is.

The three pillars of search engine optimisation

There’s three areas of website optimisation you’ll want to focus on.

Technical

So, this is the technical side of SEO. Can Google access your website properly? Can it understand the page content?

Do you have a single Heading 1, then Heading 2s and 3s throughout the page? Is the page fast enough when it loads? Is it mobile responsive? Is the text big enough on mobile? Are all the clickable elements big enough to click on mobile, and don’t conflict with anything else?

There’s a vast number of things that you need to think about. The best way to do this is to get a full technical SEO audit done for your website. Click here for more information.

Content Marketing

The next thing to consider is the content on your website. Google is getting better and better at understanding the intent behind a search and whether your website is relevant to that search. Your content has to be better than your competitors if you want to rank for a search term.

When we talk about better content, we don’t necessarily mean just the amount of words. Whilst there is proof out there that the amount of words in an article does correlate to where a page ranks within the search results, if your content is written in a way that it’s just stuffing information in there, it’s not best for the user. Google’s artificial intelligence will be able to pick up on that, meaning your rankings will start to drop.

Digital PR

The third thing then is your off-site optimisation. Is your website an authority? If so, you are going to have backlinks from some of the bigger websites in your industry.

If you provide telephone systems, for example, you will want to be getting not only links from telecoms industry publications, but you’ll also be getting links back from small business magazines and other large outlets.

The more visibility your website has online, the better your rankings are going to be, as long as the other two pillars are in place.

Which domain registrar would we recommend?

At Tao Digital Marketing, we use three domain registrars:

Namecheap are our preference. We just like the interface that they use and we like the pricing, along with the ability to just jump on and register a domain name. Within minutes you can start making changes, and it’s really easy to use. We also use GoDaddy for .co.uk domain names.

TSO Host are another domain name registrar that we have used in the past. They are a UK-based company, so we like the fact that we can just pick up the phone to the support team if we do have any issues.

But in our minds, Namecheap is the one that we would suggest using over any other.