Can using gTLDs help your business?

In the early days of the Internet, domain name suffixes were pretty limited, with .com ruling the roost. Over time, more options became available, such as country codes. Then came the era of the generic top-level domain, allowing website owners to get even more specific with their branding.

Registrations of gTLD domain names reaching new heights

Citing statistics from nTLDStats.com, domain name industry blog TheDomains noted in April that new gTLD domain name registrations exceeded 5 million for the first time. The .London domain was the 13th most commonly registered gTLD on the list, racking up more than 60,000 new registrations.

“It’s safe to say that gTLD momentum is building.”

In light of the figures from nTLDStats, it’s safe to say that gTLD momentum is building. However, co.com CEO Ken Hansen believes there’s still a way to go before registration rates peak.

“New gTLDs will continue to grow steadily,” he opined, according to a European Domain Centre blog post that collated experts’ views on gTLDs.

Do sites with gTLDs have an edge?

Hansen went on to note that the heightened gTLD adoption reflects registrars’ efforts to tailor their marketing toward the specific needs of their demographics. But will a gTLD really give a website an edge from an organic standpoint? According to digital guru Matt Cutts of Google, probably not.

“I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either,” Cutts wrote in a Google Plus post from March 2012. “If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that’s your choice, but you shouldn’t register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you’ll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.”

Have Cutts’ predictions stood the test of time? After all, his post is now more than three years old. Bill Hartzer, senior SEO strategist at Dallas-based consultancy Globe Runner, conducted an experiment in September of last year in a bid to test gTLDs’ mettle. Hartzer tested several .com and gTLD domain names with Google AdWords and drew the following conclusions:
.com domain names cost more than gTLDs and outperformed the latter in some – but not all – areas.
The PPC rate for gTLDs was lower, and gTLD domain names garnered more impressions and better positioning.

“Google AdWords tends to favor the new gTLDs, as they served up more impressions for less cost, and a better average position then the .com domain names we used,” Hartzer summarised. “At the same time, though, when it came to conversions, the public appeared to favor the .com domain names.”

It’s also important to acknowledge that for some enterprises, gTLD deployment isn’t as much about finding a better alternative to a .com domain name as it is about specifying geographic reach. For instance, IT recruitment agencies in London could use .London suffixes to express their region of focus to their audience.