Is the use of country top level domains part of your marketing strategy?

[MichaelCorfman]

There are a lot of different possible marketing strategies related to the use of top level domains.

If you're building one site for a global audience, it is common to just use generic top level domains, most commonly .com. If you're targeting a specific country, then it is also common to use the top level domain (tld) for that country. And if you are targeting multiple countries, it can make sense to own a large number of different tld's - one for each country you want to target. Google is one of the best examples of a company that has registered their name all over the world.

What's your philosophy around the tld's that you use?

Michael

[MichaelCorfman]

I thought I would comment a little on the strategy of Casino City with respect to the use of top level domains (tld's).

Historically, we have only published the Casino City website using the casinocity.com domain. We grabbed the other common domains that were still available sometime later, so, for example, we also own casinocity.org, which we redirect to casinocity.com.

More recently we have decided that it is a goal to own a large number of tld's for casino city, and we are now pro-active on that front. As one example, the .asia domain is about to enter the landrush period where anyone can register a domain with that tld with minimal restriction. Since we have a registered trademark on casino city within the US we qualified to register the domain prior to the landrush period, and took advantage of that fact to acquire the casinocity.asia domain.

Right now we own the domain casinocity for several dozen different country top level domains, and are actively looking to expand that number as part of a longer-term strategy to provide localized versions of the casino city site for most of the countries in the world.

The domain registration costs for a lot of countries is pretty outrageous, so the costs of a lot of different country level domains can add up pretty fast. Not only can the registration fees be expensive, but in some cases there are local representation expenses as well. To give one example of expensive registration expenses, the .tm domain (the country code for Turkmenistan) that has been marketed as being valuable since tm is the common abbreviation for trademark, is available only for a minimum of a ten year registration period at a typical cost of $126.62 a year (this is the price at moniker) for a registration fee of $1,266.62.

Michael

[TheGooner]

Thanks for the heads-up there Michael - very thought provoking.


We've stuck to .com's simply because I prefer to build bigger sites that target global markets - rather than a myriad of smaller country focused sites.

While I can understand that a English player might like to see a .co.uk site - and possibly identify with it "slightly" more - I also believe that the .co.uk would be a slightly negative turnoff for Germans, French, Spanish. Aussies - anyone who wasn't from that market.

The .com has always been an international "brand" - and remains neutral in my mind - and the mind of most surfers I think.

[matted]

I have stuck to .com tld's... The way I see it, the .com will remain the "primary" tld and the one which most people think of first... especially for the places I look for traffic. Spending $1200 on a domain name is certainly not the best use of funds for a smaller company like myself.

[LiveCasinoPartners]

I've been concentrating on marketing to the uk. I've got some keyword rich domain names with a .co.uk ccTLD. With having the websites hosted there, I get more targeted traffic.

In my opinion, on my scale I'd go for ccTLD's for geographically targeted keywords only for English speaking countries. Face it, those are the only ones I can see doing anytime in the foreseeable future. Although I do have a few decent (not spectacular) .com domain names, I can't afford to get many more country specific domains. Also, the odds if my being able to generate specific content targeted for each region is another factor that tells me it's not worth doing at this time. I could spend more money on original content, which would give a higher return on time and money invested.

[Ziggy]

While I believe the Internet brings all things new, the old adage that the three most important things about real estate are:

1) Location
2) Location
3) Location

I stick with .com tld's - the country location of my web host has proved most important.

The three major search engines especially give the user the option to be worldwide (www) or their own country specific checkbox.

[casinoinfogr]

As all the internet marketing experts agree for the value of local searching i beleive that will be the future.
My point of view is that growing local markets gives always biggest oportunities in webmasters
As my decision is to try my skills in more local markets not only in greece i mainly work now, i will inform you about the results the following years
...and Michael you know very well that 1,266.62 for 10 years is nothing if this local market has a potencial

[Chris-AffiliateClub]

I have been asked this question by a few affiliates over the years.

.com is obviously king but I think it's worth buying country endings too - for example co.uk I consider valuable.

The .com market is saturated so looking at other endings is becoming a must.

If you type in some of the popular search terms into Google, you will see .co.uk/.de domains (amongst other country codes) in the results nowadays.

I believe it all depends on your target market - .com is vital for an international appealing portal but a UK focused football (soccer) site should use a co.uk for example.

Furthermore, I see a good casino site (ending .ws) that ranks very highly with the big .com portals.

It's all what you do with your site and the end of the day but having country codes may help you too

[alexpratt]

I saw for the first time the other day a .eu ranking for a fairly cometitive keyword. Has anyone bothered with these?

I find more and more when I google I tick the box that says "pages from the UK" as I find if I don't I get a bunch of irrelevant sites as I really prefer sites directed at me in terms of a UK person, i.e. that lists £ as a payment, that takes payments like Maestro not just Visa and Amex that if relevent has an address in the UK, is a more UK type design (not so flashy and crazy) etc etc

[Nandakishore]

Although the use of .com domain names is an important part of my tld strategy, I think the national tlds, especially the European ones are getting more and more exposure. I would prefer to use them. However, there is one serious problem in using national tlds for gambling-related sites. It is just forbidden. You may be prosecuted, e.g. using .de. for such sites. Many affiliates do use .de, either because they ignore the risk or because of ignorance.

Nandakishore
Online Casino Newsroom

[Muppet]

We decided not to go with multiple TLDs for SEO reasons. Each TLD is regarded as a separate site by the search engines, so all your linkbacks to your .com site count for nothing when you launch a new TLD. Instead we decided to delineate by country/region via subdirectories - eg www.yourdomain.com/us and tag the pages using a lang attribute in the html.

An example of this is www.microsoft.com. Go there and change languages and see what happens.