Bruno Díaz
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As an expert seo agency we confirm that the choice of domain is a key decision in any web positioning project, both in the past, present and future.
The domain will represent our website and company, so it is important that, before entering the field of SEO, it works like any other naming: it must be unique, good sounding, related to the product or service it will represent, easy to remember and, preferably, short. If these principles are fulfilled, the next one is that it should be registrable and, obviously, free. With these requirements in mind, we must solve several existing doubts at the level of domain choice.
It is important to know if our business is oriented locally or internationally. If you are going to focus on a specific country, the use of a territorial domain such as .es or .fr is a very good option since you are showing Google your interest in a specific geographic market. That said, be careful if you are part of countries like Andorra, where the .ad domain, despite being from a country, is associated with other types of services and does not work as a territorial domain for SEO purposes. The same happens with the .tv domain of Tuvalu. By the way, did you know that 8.3% of the country's revenue comes from the sale of .tv domains? And if we go up a level, it also happens with the .eu domains that work equally well or badly in Europe as in the United States. In this article you can learn more about international seo and domain choiceand the list of all generic country top level domains that Google is updating.
In case of focusing on an international level, without a doubt, it is better to opt for a generic domain such as a .com and acquire the territorial of your country to protect yourself against the competition, nobody likes to see their brand with another domain. And be clear that even if your trademark is registered that does not prevent another company or individual to use it in their domain, but tell it to the city of Barcelona that took to court the owner of Barcelona.com (a company from the United States) and lost.
City domains are not territorial, but in practice they help because they incorporate the keyword. It is for example the case of .barcelona, using posicionamientoweb.barcelona we are incorporating the word Barcelona to Google in a natural way.
Finally, domains that are not usually recommended are free or very cheap domains such as .tk from Tokelau or .xyz as they are usually domain extensions with a high degree of spam.
We may find ourselves in the situation that our desired domain is not free and we consider buying it from its current owner. In this case we must thoroughly examine the history of this domain because we can find ourselves paying a very expensive domain that, on top of that, carries a history of penalties at SEO level that will impact very negatively on our future web positioning. I recommend that you use the Wayback Machine to see if a website existed in the past and what subject was it about.
Google claims that the use of Exact Match Domains EMDs or, the use of the exact domain name for search intentions is not a key positioning factor. However, this is not true, we only have to search for example "pintores barcelona" and see that in the first results, the domains include the keywords of the search. Although it is true that it is difficult to differentiate one domain from the other in terms of branding (where would you click? In pintoresbarcelona.com or lospintoresbarcelona.com?), this weakness can be compensated in terms of better web positioning.
By the way, in Microsoft bing it is even worse and not even bing GPT Chat escapes. In addition, these domains not only take advantage of the keywords in the domain, but also, when linking from other websites, they end up incorporating the keyword in the title of the link in a natural way.
By the way, there are cases that when a client is obsessed with an EMD and this is already purchased, he opts for hyphens between words and that is very forced. The use of hyphens in domains or the choice of very long domains tells Google that we are trying to influence Google search results and ends up achieving the opposite effect. And finally .... Can we use special characters? remember that domains are thought in ASCII code, letters like ñ or ç or accents do not exist and browsers and Google encode them so diseñoweb.com is really equivalent to xn--diseoweb-g3a.com so if you are looking for a domain that exactly matches the user's search intention you are wasting your time, if you want you can buy the diseño-web-españa.es, you will be really buying the xn--diseowebespaa-lkbi.com that won't do any good (spoiler: it is still free) and on top of that you won't be able to use it in your email.
Honestly, it doesn't matter for SEO purposes whether we use the domain with or without www. What is essential is that we make the redirection and force one, otherwise Google may consider it duplicate content.
And although it is a collateral issue, when you are creating a web page try to avoid the "under construction" covers, even if the website is new. The only thing we will achieve in terms of SEO is that Google will take longer to index our website because Google robots will access and see that there is nothing of interest.
The choice of domain does influence SEO and it is an important choice but it should always be conditioned to your brand. The domain is your brand on the internet and it must be natural: short, sound good, related to your service or brand and if it can include a great keyword. Pay attention to the extension and always try to buy the generic one and the one of the country where you operate, even if you simply redirect it. And, above all, do not be obsessed with placing all the keywords or EMD.
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The choice of the domain and its extension is key to SEO