​​​​​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 requiring 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 a .xyz or org.uk it really doesn't matter.  

Also the name doesn't matter either, a lot of people in the past decided that Google it was better to have an exact match keyword in a domain.

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 to, so your domain rating or the domain authority is very important. This is calculated by where you back links 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 to purchase when you think about your search engine optimisation is “Are you happy with the domain name?”.

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. So for example 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.

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

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

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 2 and 3’s 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 when looking at on-site to my patient. The best way to do this is to get a full technical SEO audit done for your website.

A full technical SEO audit something that Tao digital marketing can offer click here for more information.

The next thing to consider is obviously 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 competitor in the search 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.

There is proof out there that the amount of words in an article does correlate to where a page ranks within the search results, however, if your content is written in a way that it's just stuffing information in there then it's not best for the user and therefore either now or in the near future Googles artificial intelligence will be able to pick up on that and then you will start to lose rankings If you've ever getting them in the first place.

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

So if you provide telephone systems for example, you will want to be getting not only links back from telecoms industry publications but you'll also be getting links back from small business magazines and potentially big sites like entrepreneur.com.

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.

So, this is where we contradict ourselves a little in that if your business can get a .com domain name that is the one to go for.

If you can't get a .com domain name then the others are fine from a search point of view. I guess the main question is whether a visitor will click on it and feel that it's secure enough as a website.

So with the example above we looked at technology companies, I personally know that if I'm looking for technology or a software solution or something similar then a .io TLD makes sense in that industry because that is the new norm.

When you’re looking at other top level domain name information if you are looking for one, think about the user, think about the competitors in the market and think about whether that person is going to actually click on your link.

At Tao digital marketing we use 3 domain registrar's

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 register a domain name and then within minutes you can start changing things and it's really easy to use.

GoDaddy we use for .co.uk domain names. Namecheap for some reason have an issue registering .co.uk at the moment they are predominately dot.com and other top level domains. I think it's something to do with the UK registration company behind .co.uk registrations and they don't have a link to the back office systems.

TSO host, another domain name registrar that we have used in the past and in fact we have a couple of websites domain names registered with them. 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 there's not much between all three.

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