Just read this article from TechCrunch on domains while ploughing through my never ending mountain of new blog posts in my feed reader.

It basically says domains are getting less and less important as most people just type the company name (or even full URL) into Google and go with the first result as it is usually correct 99.9% of the time.

The article talks about how new radical domain name suffixes like: .me and .tv havn’t really caught on yet.  .com is still the old standby and it seems people havn’t adjusted to the idea that a URL doesn’t have to end in .com

The main point of TechCrunch was that the domain ending is unimportant as people just Google it anyways. So if you can’t get a domain with the glorified .com extension, don’t fear, just SEO it well enough that the ending matters less. (Google sees .com[s] the same way as a .net or .me) Tip:  it would be more important to have a relevant keyword in the domain.

I think as .com[s] get harder to find, companies will be using the new suffixes being released like .law , .med , .atlanta as a way to more easily peg relevantideas about their company. i.e. local/regional affiliation or industry related.

The analogy may be that if you were telling someone how to get to Blake’s Famous Pizzeria you would tell them the name of the restaurant and maybe what is nearby. You don’t say it is at exactly 5301 Cedar Street (usually). Likewise, people find it inconvenient to remember the URL of a business. Instead they put the company name in Google and take the first result.

For one of our family businesses, Moose Hollow Trading Co. a  rustic furniture store and e-commerce site,  we get a surprising amount of organic traffic from people typing www.moosehollow.com into Google and then clicking that result to our site. Perhaps people are just unsure of the exact address? Maybe they are just cautious? Either way people’s browsing habits seem to rely less on an exact URL and more on the company listing in the SERPs.

Any new domain extensions you are looking forward to?