geo target domain or not

[meelosh]

I am about to build a site for a restaurant and we are discussing the name and domain. Lets for example say we have decided the name to be "Mikes". Right of the bat we cannot get the exact domain for example mikes.com as it is already taken. So the next option i am looking at would be to add the location to the domain mikeschelsea.com as an example (name + cityname). My question is will this be acceptable (seo) as i have read yes and no in many articles. The bottomline is i cannot get the exact domain name so am looking at getting domain name + geo location and thought it being a retaurant it could in a small way benefit local seo.....appreciate any input tks

[piatkow]

There is a lot more to it than that. I do know of a UK local business that purchased an name+location domain name and hosting on-line from a US company. They ranked well in the US (which has 3 towns of that name) but not at all when searched from the UK!

common name + location in a domain name makes a lot of sense to make the name memorable for type ins. A lot of town and city names are repeated across the English speaking world so relying only on the location in a .com name won't cut it. From your example I count 17 Chelseas in Wikipedia in four different countries,

For a local business I would always go for a ccTLD if you are outside of the US and certainly host locally. You want the location and type of business clear on the home page as well as the title and meta description.

[meelosh]

thanks piatkow.....my bad on the example and totally agree....i will be using a ccTLD as it is not US based. I am trying to get a feel if this will at-least not "hurt" the site and then anything it can maybe help with locally will be a +

[RedBar]

About 10 years ago I was ask to construct a local hotel/bar website in the UK. There are hundreds/thousands (15.4 million results) of UK estabishments with this specific name therefore I recommended that we went with specificname+town.co.uk

This has turned out to be an excellent decision with that site ranking on the first page for many keyword phrases and even for the specific name which, to be honest, was never a target since the most important results we wanted was for hotel(s), accommodation, wedding(s) etc in our region.

Interestingly many hotels/pubs in the UK now use this format since it certainly seems to assist in the local SERPs if my experience has anything to do with it.

[meelosh]

thanks for that RedBar...this is the way we will be going. One question though...did you go [specificname"hyphen"town] or just [specificnameTown]? appreciate it tks

[RedBar]

In this case no hyphen since it was a total of 14 letters and all distinguishable enough to be easily read.

In 1998 we launched a site and it had repeated letters bang in the middle of the name therefore we registered both but used the hypenated version to avoid both typo and reading confusion, in this case the name was:

LLLLneneLLLL we use LLLLne-neLLLL and it has never had any ranking/SEO issues.

The non-hypenated version has always pointed at the hyphenated one.