Over the past dozen months, Bluetext has renamed about the same number of brands – some as large as a global spinoff of GE – others the up and comers that challenge them.
Despite our counsel to open the naming process to a broader range of TLDs, about 90% percent of them required right up front that the new name have an available .com domain associated with it – not a simple task these days unless you are willing to cough up five – or more likely – six to seven figures to acquire it.
While we are by no means dismissing the .com as a viable option – it has been around since the birth of the internet – so it’s important to understand that as technology advances there is going to be an increasing shift to alternative TLDs as .coms eventually take their rightful place in history.
Among the steadily growing influx of new TLDs – .CO domains are widely considered the most global and credible extension for your online brand presence. Universally recognized as an abbreviation for company, corporation, commerce, and collaboration -.CO domain names are memorable and in the vast majority of applications – shorter than their .com brethren – who by the way even spots them a letter right off the bat by dropping the “m”.
With viable .COM inventory nearly exhausted, the newest innovators and challenger brands are left with limited domain choices within the extension – and often with very little in common with their brand – rendering them less and less likely to come to your user’s mind when they are searching for a specific company.
Most modern, tech savvy users are already directly typing in the URL and are likely to find you no matter what as long as they know what they are looking for. And with the emergence of even more new TLDs getting ready to stream out over the next few years – more and more consumers will be looking more closely at the tail end of the domain.
And finally, for those of you who might be worried about how a .CO domain stacks up against a .COM from an SEO perspective – a .CO web address is treated the same say as any legacy TLDs, such as .com, .net and .org. and has the same potential to rank high among primary search engines – provided of course you have valuable, accessible and contextually relevant content regardless of your choice of extension.
Here’s a link to Google’s SEO authority and search quality engineer Matt Cutts confirming exactly that:
At Bluetext, we believe that .CO is a solid alternative for branding your business – offering a perfect way for new companies to reduce their barrier of entry into the market by providing a platform to acquiring shorter, fresher and more brand centric domains.