Your domain name is your identity online. Domain names have an impact on SEO. Choosing the right domain name for your business can help you target your audience and accelerate your search engine placement.
Does domain extension affect SEO?
Buying a good domain address can give your website an SEO boost. .com has a greater value in the mindset of people as they will “default” to .com if they don’t remember the exact domain for your website. Google uses a default geo-oriented TLDs to target a specific country.
If your business or site, for example, serves US users or it is a global English-speaking audience oriented, choose .com.
- If your site is for a specific country or language, choose the relevant extension — such as ‘.co.uk’ or ‘.de’.
- If you absolutely can not get the .com domain you want, choose a .co, .org or .net instead.
Does having a relevant keyword in a domain name help SEO?
Does your domain address affect SEO?
Domain Name definitely affects Seo of your site, especially domains that contain exact match keywords. This is because of the EMD update – Deconstructing The Google EMD Update. One of the first and main important steps from an SEO perspective is selecting the right domain name for your website as this can have an impact on your business’s online success.
When you have finalized your domain address, do a Google search with it and find out what search results are displayed with this name. If your chosen domain address is going to be competing with many popular and powerful domains, it might take a lot of time to secure a good rank for your website.
A higher click-through rate from the search results and people will be more likely to visit the site if your domain name is relevant and trustworthy.
How do I choose a good domain name for SEO?
To make the process easier, we have a few simple steps that you can use to pick the best domain for your website.
- Stick with .com
- Use keywords in your domain name search
- Keep your domain name short
- Make it easy to pronounce and spell
- Keep it unique and brandable
- Avoid hyphens in domain name
- Avoid doubled letters
- Leave room to expand
- Research your domain name
Will changing my domain name affect my SEO?
Changing your main domain address can affect your SEO, even updating your permalink can.
Whenever you update the permalink of your page, make sure you do the following:
- Permanent 301 redirect permalink to the new.
- Request re-indexing of both of your URLs.
This will help you maintain your URLs search relevancy and you may even regain your rankings.
This kind is usually not recommended as the impact on your rankings could be much more significant and you may not even be able to fully recover your search presence.
However, if you have no choice here are the correct steps to take when updating your URL:
- Make sure the website has been completely moved and the new website is functioning properly.
- 301 redirect your old domain to the new domain, make sure you choose to Redirect with or without www. if you are redirecting via cPanel.
- Add & Verify your new domain to Google Webmasters
For more ways to optimize your web presence and reach out to more customers, check out our blog.