Someone already has the .co.uk and I am sure they bought up the other english speaking countries too.
My question is do you think that there really are benefits to buying a country specific domain name? By benefits I do not mean seo or directory listings I am speaking about branding purposes. Do people in the uk prefer to go to a co.uk domain name or is .com internationally recognized as the "best" extension to have.
I have been researching and people in the forum tend to agree that it helps with seo and directories placement, especially now that google released part of thier algorithim and it said that location is important, which only convinces me to host in the target country I am still not convinced of the effectivness of buying a different domain extension. This topic was covered a little in this thread [webmasterworld.com...] in many others but I didn't find anything that specifically answered my questions.
Dealing with the optimization do you think it would be alright to just buy a similar domain with the country extension and host it in the country and forward it to my .com so that we can avoid paying alot for our other country extensions. (I reeally do not want to spend anymore money on this, personally I didn't want to spend more than 70 dollars as I think this whole domain name thing is overated and if you are creative enough you can usually find a much cheaper name, my business partner thought otherwise, but please do not start a discussion of this on this thread as I would like to hear your opinions of my topic question)
Thanks,
Josh
[edited by: jatar_k at 5:11 am (utc) on July 23, 2005]
[edit reason] linked up [/edit]
1. Is there a branding benefit to employing a country specific domain?
If your marketing plan is to send the message to consumers that your company "is UK based" then yes.
2. Do people in the UK prefer to go to a .co.uk domain?
Are you talking about type-in bias, such as typing in Example.com vs. Example.co.uk? What do you do? What do your friends and associates do?
Now versus the future might be an important question. In time, will a "local bias" arise, especially when "locals" are searching for local services or sellers of goods? I'd favor local for locals looking forward.
3. Is .com internationally recognized as the "best" extension?
Best? No. Most populated, used by large companies, most of the largest portal sites, etc? Yes.
Suggestion: You are missing the boat.
The cost of a extra or back-up domain should be chump change to any successful business.
In your hypothetical the extra domain is an insurance policy. You know: The stuff you pay $$$$ for every year, year after year, despite never filing a claim.
Buy the extra domain. Make it a feeder site. Get some use out of it. However, for long term planing I see no reason for a business that intends to grow and be successful to not buy the second version.
Brands need to be clean and simple and preferably definitive - no room for any confusion.
There are more pages with .co.uk than .com pages for sites based in the UK. (If you want some charts PM me as I'm not allowed to link to them from here.)
Some people here in the UK will instinctively type .co.uk as others will type .com. It's best not to try and judge whats in the users mind but try and cover as many options as possible I would have thought. But in the end it comes down to economics and how viable is the market place in each country.
At less than US$20 for 2 years there is no reason not to. (the wholesale price is just GB£5 for 2 years, avoid some lower priced companies though, sticky me for a suggestion)
Apart from it being so cheap as to be silly not to, I think there are definate benefits to appearing to be from the UK when dealing with this side of the Atlantic. To this end you need to check that the language on your site is not AmericaniZed. People may not check if you really are from the UK, but they will spot a site that has not been altered for the UK market. We are not very keen on the way that many US sites sell, we're a little more reserved and find the classic e-book sales techniques the worst turn off possible.
Back to domains, there are some real bargains to be picked up if your business partner wins the 'I want to invest in a really godd domain' argument. There are many smalltime domain speculators that have not sold domains for a while so if the name you want is in one of their hands you may be in luck. I was recently contemplating the purchase of a very good domain for under US$1000 but decided against it due to time constraints on not being able to develop it properly.
Good Luck
As to webwork asking what do my friends and I do? Well we are all in the united states so we only use .coms so I did not know how others behave, but now thanks to the responses I am under the impression that it is important and I will buy the .co.uk because as gpmgroup said it is instinctive for people to type in the country extensions as it is for the .coms
thanks for the help!
