Why Dotcom. What about other TLD’s (extensions like .us,.biz,.me)
There has been a lot of noise about other TLD”s; but that’s all it is, NOISE.
Here are a few pointers:
-800 numbers still rule. So do Dotcoms.
-If you were to consume 1 week of media from primetime TV (ie: NFL, NBA, American Idol, Desperate House Wives, etc.), listening to the radio, reading billboards as you drive, it is our estimate that within that 1 week, you will see 95 to 99 percent Dotcom (with some dotorg, dotgov , dotedu) totaling hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising and branding. Finding Walmart online is simple; you know to go to Walmart.com. Want see what’s going on in the NFL? Go to NFL.com. Missed who got the axe on American Idol? Just visit AmericanIdol.com. Dotcom has become part of the brand and consumer mindset. If you own Chocolate.com, nothing would be better than someone buying Chocolate.tv and spending millions against it; Chocolate.com would undoubtedly garner much of this traffic, mainly because the public is conditioned, all day, everyday, for many years to trust the dotcom extension. In Germany, where .DE has prevailed as a country code TLD better than most, the top 10 websites are still .com’s. The same goes for China. The more TLD’s available, as well as the increased dilution of these TLD’s, the better the outcome for dotcom assets, as they become more important.
Some of the strategic reasons to own a generic domain name:
-Leads to being rated higher for relevancy and thus optimizes better in the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
This is the most important of many points. The algorithms that Google uses to rank sites constantly changes, but the one component that is consistently weighed higher than the rest is a site’s relevancy score. Google is trying to deliver the most legitimate and relevant results to cut out any “spam” sites. It has been proven that when the keyword being searched is in the domain, that relevancy scores are high, but when the domain fits that term, then you get the highest relevancy score. There are still “naysayers,” such as SEO agencies, that don’t work with the best domains, but will claim that they can deliver top performances by utilizing great SEO blocking and tackling techniques and ultimately obtaining high rankings on Google. To put this in simpler terms, all that an SEO firm does is add content–LOTS of content to your site, as well as add links (preferably one way, inbound links to and from other sites. If one site does a fabulous job with SEO, including pages of relevant content, and then a new company with a generic domain name does a lousy job with SEO and just has a parked site, then the lesser domain should, but not always, win in free search, mainly because the lesser domain is simply a more developed site (sometimes the domain can even prevail here in less competitive categories). However, if both sites are equally developed, the category and keyword domain name will win every time on relevancy given time.
This leads to the question: How do domains help with Paid Search, PPC, or SEM? Anyone can pay out a few bucks for placement in the paid search, but there is emerging evidence that category domain names attract more clicks; paid placement would positively influence your free, organic search results (paid companies are seen by the spiders as more relevant), and mort importantly, when someone does click on a link in the paid search results, if the link/domain name is generic your visitors are more likely to remember the domain name, and therefore they are more likely to return to it at a future date, and even more likely to refer their friends to your site.
The final key point as it relates to search is direct navigation to your site. Let’s say an Internet user has never heard of neither MerchantAccounts.com, nor MerchantExpress.com. Of the two, the generic domain name (MerchantAccounts.com) is more likely to be typed directly into the browser by the user, whereas names such as MerchantExpress.com would not; free and paid search traffic that has typed in or searched the words “Merchant Account” is the highest qualified lead on the Internet. For example, at InsuranceQuotes.com, 50 percent of Direct Navigation and free search traffic becomes an active plicy, and the overall conversion including paid search is 30+ percent.
-Creates an intuitive address and brand in your industry
The Internet has a lot of clutter in every category, also reflected in Google. Having an intuitive domain cuts through it all.
- Has instant credibility with consumers and businesses.
Consumers are conditioned to see a category term domain and assume it is credible, in the same way Google sees as relevant. Sometimes there is one opportunity to get that visitor or customer and the credible address wins.
- Establishes your business as the authority in its category.
When salespeople call customers as Creditcards.com, at the business development level, they come in door with inherent credibility.
-Is proven to significantly increase recall when advertised or marketed.
With offline advertising such as radio, TV or billboard, a memorable easy to spell intuitive address(Baby.com for J & J) will be recalled when the target is ready to visit your site. It’s possible someone doesn’t need insurance the day they see the ad. Then in 6 months they do and it is proven that they are more likely to recall and visit a category site like InsuranceQuotes.com .
- Leads to dramatic reduction of lost traffic due to lower retention and misspelling.
- Provides the most authoritative Internet address even for proven brands.
- Protect yourself from a competitor having the category domain
Andrew – Despite your past successes, you have a narrow view that fails to account for the success of other tld’s already in operation across the internet. This simple reality negates your assertion that the whole world is somehow only about dotcom.
I agree with you that .com is the gold standard. However, you overstate your point by calling non-com alternatives “noise”. That’s not a balanced comment.
This kind of black or white thinking is not practical or realistic for a majority of companies. There can be only one Chocolate.com, or Beer.com. Using your logic, that category of products is forever closed because the .com went for millions.
Your position on the issue needs some balance because companies are successfully utilizing many other extensions beyond .com. They have to … because many of the leading .com premiums are well outside their financial reach or are already taken.
M Menius
I appreciate your comments. What I believe is it would be smarter to pick a different DOTCOM domain (Chocolateisgood.com ) rather than spend a lot of money and energy marketing Chocolate.ANY OTHER TLD, which will just lead people to the dotcom, which they are conditioned to go to by the billions of dollars spent weekly on marketing the .COM extension in all prime media by all large companies. While i beleive the advantages of having a generic category dotcome are significant, i believe one is better with a secondary brand .COM than a generic .BIZ for example. If you look at country codes, almsot every country’s top 10 websites are DOTCOM: China, England, Japan, even Germany which tends to be strong with .DE. Appreciate the comments.
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Sometimes it’s really that simple, isn’t it? I feel a little stupid for not thinking of this myself/earlier, though.
Brilliant post about google. I’m frankly incredibly dumbfounded that it has not really been pronounced before to such great lengths.
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