Local Niches and Domain Names

**Kovich** · 7 March, 2010, 18:39 PM

Hello everyone.

I'm planning a new project to take place in a few months to profit off of a local niche - but I'm wondering if a .us would be better than a .com, since I would clearly only be targeting local people, and .us is the most local domain extension you can get here.

So my question is: Local niches in the US: .com or .us?

**bogart** · 7 March, 2010, 20:22 PM

As far as I can tell the exact match bonus is only applied to the .com, .org and .net tlds.

**nux** · 31 March, 2010, 04:16 AM

I've seen some instances where .us TLD seem to benefit from exact match. I am currently experimenting with this right now, and probably wont have any results for a few months atleast.

But, if you have a choice, always go for the .com.

**bogart** · 1 April, 2010, 11:30 AM

Another issue to consider is bleed over where the user defaults to a .com as it's the most known extension. I just came across a bog post discussing the issue: http://www.thedomains.com/2010/03/02...tors-in-1-day/

A couple of interesting points where the (1) the owner of a .com received a 10% bleed over from a .info that had been advertised for five minutes on CBS during the winter Olympic games (2) a Geo domain is losing 20% of the traffic to a friends parked .com

**Will.Spencer** · 5 April, 2010, 10:34 AM

I don't have an explanation for this, but Google appears to hate all of my sites hosted on .us domains.

This does not appear to be true for .uk domains.

**garfish** · 5 April, 2010, 12:14 PM

i'd still go for .com users tend to remember it when domain has .com extension.

**bogart** · 7 April, 2010, 08:26 AM

Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

I don't have an explanation for this, but Google appears to hate all of my sites hosted on .us domains.

This does not appear to be true for .uk domains.

dot com is more or less the default US tld.

**xxtoni** · 8 April, 2010, 12:13 PM

Well honestly if you put enough work into it doesent really matter what ext. you are using...but i guess you can never go wrong with .com

**Jammyjoker** · 14 April, 2010, 11:20 AM

I think you can book both domains. You can get local and international peoples.

**Loko** · 14 April, 2010, 12:52 PM

Originally Posted by xxtoni

Well honestly if you put enough work into it doesent really matter what ext. you are using...but i guess you can never go wrong with .com

The extension does matter when you're talking about geo targeting which is what the topic starter is asking.

If you use the .com, then you will have to set manual geotargeting. When using a ccTLD Google uses that to determine the targeting region. I am not sure if that counts for all ccTLDs however.

Backlinks from locally hosted sites will help a lot too.