Thinking about purchasing a new gTLD? Wondering how that might affect your SEO and future business prospects? Before you go any further, watch Jeff shed some light on this debate.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Jeff Gabriel. I am the co-founder and CEO of  Saw.com. We are the leading domain brokerage on the net. We’re always writing fresh content to help viewers like yourself understand and love the same industry that all of those that work with me at Saw.com have grown to love. I’ve made a list of common questions and I want to answer each of these questions in 30 seconds or less.

Who should buy a new gTLD Domain?

Will a gTLD domain serve any additional SEO advantage or disadvantage over other more common domain extensions such as .com, .net, .org, .info, and others?

When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), we all know that there’s an algorithm behind it that Google looks at or some of the other search engines look at. It’s not just about the domain name. It’s also about:
  • Content
  • Link building
  • Age of the domain
  • Age of the site
  • The competition that you’re getting into
You could rank number one in a particular category that doesn’t really have strong competition, but let’s say you wanted to get in the credit card or insurance business. For you to search “car insurance” and get to number one with any domain name, it’s going to take a long time, a lot of money, and it’s going to take potentially years to get to the top of that. To be able to knock out places like State Farm and Progressive and all these other companies that have giant SEO teams working to stay at number one, you’re gonna have to beat that. That’s a very hard position to take. But to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of SEO having to do with extensions, there was an amazing study done by a colleague of mine, Bill Hartzer, where he did register and put content on many of the new extensions. The extension of the gTLDs that actually rank the most was .XYZ surprisingly. It even beat out .com. The thing is though, is that was really just registering brand new domain names. Now, are you going to go and hand register a domain? I would probably care to wager that the age of the domain is something that is very important when it comes to SEO. And I would suggest that you go to the drop auctions or the expiration auctions that you can find at Name Jet or many other places, and find yourself a reasonably priced .com, .net, or .org, whatever you need for your business, that makes sense that is at least a few years old. I think that will give you more of a boost than worrying more about the extension. And as I always say, try to take the path of least resistance. People are more used to a .com currently at the present time than a .today or a .XYZ. .Com is commonplace, so if you’re going to take that domain, and not just rely on SEO, but repeat business, advertising, things like that, you want to get the .com. It’s a very important thing that you do that.
Jeff