.io vs .com - What to choose?

If I got a two worded brandable & related to my niche .com and a 3 letter (perfectly related to my niche) .io domainm which one should I go with to establish the presence of a web company?

The domain is related to IT/SaaS service or web app. The three letter .io is an acronym of the tool while as the two worded .com is brandable.

I would like to get some expert opinion on what to finalize.
- Does .com has an advantage over .io on SERP ranks?
- How long would it take for a .io to start getting decent organic search traffic?
- As an end customer do you think a super catchy 3 letter .io works better than a 8 letter .com ? If so, how much do think is the right price to go for for such a domain in this industry?

 

.com defiantly does better as far as ranking go.
Hard to tell, look at .info , .com still does better.
I personally think .io looks nicer, I would much rather have a 3 letter .io then a 8 letter .com , I also don't relay on search engines that much though.

Overall, i'd go with the 3 letter .io

 

I'd probably go with both. .com for the marketing side of things, .io for the actual app.

Cheers

 

Smart idea, do all the seo and stuff on the .com and then have the app on the .io

 

I have never heard about .io before until now. If you want a three-letter domain, you may want to choose more popular extensions like .info, .me, and .mobi. The latter two still have many three-letter domains that you could get with a good deal.

 

As you are from India, you should go with a 3 letter .in or a 3 number .in domain
I don't think .io is a better choice. You can use .com also.
In my opinion get a 3 letter .in domain name with one .com

 

It really depends on the expected user. I would hesitate to go with a .io domain unless you are specifically targeting developers (an api, or something like that). I went through a similar decision recently, and decided to opt for the two word .com (for ~$500) instead of the one word .io. I spoke with a few people that I felt would be within my target demographic, and they all seemed confused by .io, and did not sound very comfortable with it.

 

I would say only use the .io or other extensions such as .ly when it fits in with the word. Such as bitly. Otherwise, there is no comparison.

 

even bitly redirect to .com

 

Agree with you, io is good if this match the product/company niche, but in term of popularity I have never seen an .io domain returned when I perform a Google search.

 

Since your business sounds like a commercial company you should always be the owner of a .com domain, as the name commercial suggests. After you have purchased the .com domain you can always buy more domains, especially if you operate in a certain country you should own the country TLD (Top-Level Domain).

 

Firstly, in terms of SEO it doesn't matter if it's .io, .com, etc, as they are all treated equally (except for local search, but you can do geo-targeting to make your domain locally relevant). Having a .com won't help you rank higher than having a .org, .info, .io, .monkeypoo or whatever.

More importantly:

Thinking about your end user is very important. Word of mouth, type-ins, etc. Well, imagine this:


jagan123: "Don't forget to visit my site jagan123.io."
jagan123 fanboi: "Sure thing!"

jagan123 fanboi returns home and puts in jagan123iocom, jagan123.com, jagan123.website, etc, but really can't manage with just .io as he's just an ordinary consumer and not a techy.

Do you get the picture?

Hack domains are cool, but not worth buying if you don't have the .com as well. Domains ending with .whatever for the sake of it are find if you don't care about word-of-mouth, type-ins, etc, and it's a site for search engine traffic only (e.g. informational with Adsense on it).