.com website domain already taken — game over?

Sandtree

coffeehound said:

Neil_Jones said:

Nothing to stop you buying.co.uk, .xyz, .coop or whatever you like regardless of what state the .com is.  Domains are usually first come first served.

Sandtree said:

.com is the preferred domain however if you are aiming at uk consumers having the .co.uk is very close second if not slightly preferable. 

Is it a poor compromise do you think?  Or, since hardly anyone actually types in URLs these days, as long as the actual address is set up for SEO, then no problem?  I've got no feel for this stuff yet.

Not if targeting the UK, which obviously you have since said you aren't. Just head over to the consumer rights board and see the hundreds of threads on people that bought from far east companies without realising simply because its a .co.uk domain. They may not have typed the URL but have gotten confidence from the chosen TLD.

Don't underestimate the power of consumer initial reaction. In a previous life I worked with a chap that had spent vast sums of money getting permission to have British in his company name and using the roundel (think spitfire) as his logo. He was a modest single product reseller of a white labeled product but do consumer surveys and his brand scored higher than some household names and massively higher than some well established brands... got £X0m when he flogged the company a few years later.

CoastingHatbox

I honestly don't think the .tld (top level domain) matters that much. If you can't get an appropriate country specific .tld, just pick the most appropriate non-country specific one.

Whatever name you have chosen for your company, take a note of what is in the search results because that is your competition for SEO. It sounds like you might have already done that, just be sure to do some investigation around those top ranking sites in terms of how well optimised they are for the company name you have thought up. Particularly in terms of the back links that those results have.

The same also applies when doing your SEO for other terms customers might look for to find your product/service.

You might find that the person squatting on the domain you do want approaches you after a while. If the offer is a tempting one, don't say yes immediately. In fact, don't engage straight away either. If you have an established website on an alternate .tld, the .com becomes more valuable to you and less valuable to everyone else. In other words, there a fewer people potentially interested in buying it so the seller either sells it to you, squats on it indefinitely (incurring expense) or lets it lapse.

The only other people who might be interested in buying the .com if/when it becomes available, is your competition.

Final thought, if you do manage to switch to that .com, and start using it, either HTTP 301 redirect traffic from the .com to your site, or move your site to the .com and HTTP 301 redirect traffic from your old .tld to the .com.

Don't make your website available on the two separate domains with the HTTP 301 (moved permanently) redirect otherwise you will take a hit on your SEO. Search engines don't like duplicate content because it looks less authoritative.

coffeehound

Thanks v much for the posts; extremely informative and interesting reading.  Strangely enough it isn’t a hyphenated TLD (thank you, CoastingHatbox), it’s a five-letter, fashionably snappy-sounding proper word, which is an unusual find, from my recent experience.

Think I’ll follow the advice to buy up two or three of the other suffixes and go from there.  Thanks pb, yes you are not far off the mark

pbartlett

snappy - yes my dog eats like that too ...:)