hi everyone, i am from europe and i have a question with regards to the domain name that we should use for a new website targeting the US market - I will use "company" as our company name in this example. the company website company.com cannot be used for the US website, since this is our "international" domain, kind of a worldwide international presentation of our company. so for the US market basically we have two options: 1) www.company.us or 2) www.company-usa.com some people argue that a .com domain is always better in the US, some say that company.us is best for the US. I would really appreciate everyones comment on this one - what do you guys think?
Personally I think the company name and .com is always good but you could have the .us pointing to the site as well.
.us is not a good extension for one main reason: it simply doesn't geotarget well in the USA. I cannot even remember the last time I've seen a .us show up in a search result. I've run a couple .us sites with aggressive link building, and all they can show up for are long tail terms. I've also run a few .com's and was able to rank for decent 2-word keywords on page 1 of Google within half a year...that alone prompted me to stop investing in .us
thanks markn26, is your study very new (when was it?) -> the reason i'm asking is if you look at this thread http://www.internetinc.com/the-dot-US-domain-handicap then you will see that teh author is about to change his mind (update from january)
I had the opposite experience. Are your targetted keywords highly competitive? maxximaxxi Out of your two options I would definitely go for the .us version.. Nobody likes a "company-anything.com". If you are branding it the extension should make little impact on the traffic. Unless you expect a lot of natural traffic?
It was relatively competitive, but in a market that has sites with very little SEO. Agreed with promo about the domain...another alternative is CompanynameINC.com, CompanynameLLC.com or CompanynameCo.com as a last resort, depending on what type it is.
.com is better than .us Try to register .us also and redirect it to .com Dont forget to block your .us domain from indexing on search engines by using robots.txt otherwise searching may consider your site as duplicate
.us domains are good when you can use it to complete a word imo for example scriptaculous started being something like script.aculo.us ...
com is better than us. like narendra says, use the .com as main and redirect us to com. it's the best solution in my opinion.
I think .coms are better for branding in general. If you are a company, then you are going to take both names anyway.