77% of UK searchers prefer .uk to .com

Nominet Reports

[IanTurner]

Okay this was late last year but we missed it at the time.

Nominet's annual domain name industry report reveals that 77% of British consumers prefer to use a .uk rather than a .com when searching for information on the Internet.

[nominet.org.uk...]

[piatkow]

I imagine that most people will be searching for a local / national site rather than an overseas one and think that .com will give US based results. Actually Google and Bing both redirect to their .uk sites from within the UK.

[engine]

Thanks Ian,
That's useful ammo when advising which to choose.

[Mark_A]

Do you mean 1) they prefer to search on google.co.uk or bing.co.uk for example? or

2) are you saying they prefer to visit .co.uk sites when searching for things from Britain?

I can believe in #2 quite easily.

[topr8]

this result would have nothing to do with the fact that nominet is in charge of .uk domain registrations would it?

[Mark_A]

:-) at topr8 .. I thought that also ..

Consumers stated they would most likely click on .uk rather than a .com reinforcing that .uk is a relevant and trusted environment that presents the most appropriate and local information.

[Mark_A]

I am relatively comfortable with people using .com .co.uk and .net but far less comfortable with the rest.

Apart from anything else they are just hard to remember .uk.org or whatever, I would never remember that!

[Mark_A]

For example on the idea of memorableness ..

We buy any car dot com ....

It just would not work if it said

we buy any car dot edu dot uk dot net ..... ! :-)

[engine]

Horses for courses Mark_A.
btw, I can't stand that ad.

I know of a small engineering company that sells to UK only. When they first set up they decided to go with a .com

They are quite often asked, 'oh, you're a UK company! I wasn't sure you dealt with UK.'

[mack]

I think it makes sense to have both the .com and .co.uk but if I was advising a UK company I would advise them to develop on .co.uk and redirect .com to .co.uk

Mack.

[IanTurner]

It is that they prefer a .co.uk result to a .com result in the SERPs when presented with a choice.

Apparently EURID have been doing some similar research and their results are that the local cctld is always preferred to .com with .eu lagging behind. (I haven't had any corroboration of this research though)

I also know that Nominet have a vested interest - but would tend to believe them, they just wouldn't have made capital out of the results if they hadn't been in their favour.

[Samizdata]

77% of British consumers prefer to use a .uk rather than a .com when searching for information

Around 90% in UK use Google and get redirected to the .uk version by geolocation.

Around 90% of those would not know how to change to the .com anyway.

If they are looking to purchase they can be better off with .uk results (shipping costs etc).

But eschewing .com when "searching for information" is simply absurd.

...

[jmccormac]

Eurid's research is Mickey Mouse stuff that's only designed to make .eu look good. They used what's known in the Search business as the Infinite Monkeys approach. They got a pile of students to evaluate a small sample of websites and slathered a bunch of statistical methodology on top. I run a websurvey of the Irish webspace (approx 250K websites) every few months (not sure if I can post the results URL) and .eu usage is much lower than ccTLD or .com in Ireland. The last time I did a survey of .co.uk websites, the percentage of active .co.uk websites was much higher than that of .eu ccTLD. (Both these surveys had samples of 1.5 Million plus websites in each ccTLD from what I remember.)

These are the stats of Irish hosted .eu domains/websites for May 2010. The Percentage is given for websites in the survey and for the sites represented as the number of domains.

Website Type Websites Domains
Active/Unclassified 24.08% 17.34%
Brand Protection 2.25% 1.62%
Inpage Redirect 2.39% 1.72%
Forbidden 1.90% 1.37%
Government 0.68% 0.49%
Holding Pages 17.82% 12.83%
Duplicate Content 1.15% 0.83%
Parked/PPC 28.02% 20.18%
Redirect (301/302) 21.12% 15.21%
Unavailable 0.24% 0.17%

There are more Irish hosted .co.uk domains (12516 identified as of 01/July/2010 compared to 8290 identified Irish hosted .eu domains).

Just at a glance, the domain counts for UK hosters as of 01/July/2010 are:
com: 2904384
net: 411211
org: 278750
biz: 100318
info: 158464
mobi: 29237
asia: 11497
ie: 9162
us: 17737

The .uk ccTLD domain count for 30/June/2010 was 8587726. The UK is massively .UK centric.

Regards...jmcc