Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
SEO Value in Switching to ".NYC" Domain?
-
Recently " .NYC" domains have become available for purchase to New York City based businesses.
I own and operate a New York City commercial real estate firm, nyc-officespace-leader.com. New domain would be www.metro-manhattan.nyc
Our existing domain has been in use for seven years.would there be an SEO benefit to transferring our site to .NYC domain? Or would a new domain kill our domain rank?
Thanks, Alan
-
Hi All:)
Popping back in here with a little proviso. While I think The Sage's suggestion is creative, I would strongly stipulate that if you do choose to go with a multi-domain approach, your NAP (name, address, phone) must reside on only one of the two websites. And do not use the second domain in any of your citation building. You do not want Google getting mixed up finding the same basic contact details on two different websites - it can create a nightmare of merged and duplicate listings, negatively impacting the clarity of your citations and the ranking power they provide. As you can tell, I'm not a big fan of multi-site approaches for local businesses in most cases, because of these risks, and if you do decide to go with this route, do be careful to run the second site as a completely separate entity that does not share basic NAP with the main, local site. Hope this advice is helpful!
-
As a real estate brokerage firm our business is local in nature. If we can get improved ranking for such terms as "New York City office space" it would help our business immensely.
Your suggestion of using both .com and .NYC is very good.
Thanks,
Alan -
I ran your existing site through the Moz platform here and discovered a domain authority of 24 for your existing domain. While this isn't awful, it's not so great that you'd want to hold on to it with an ironclad grip. Remember -- throwing good money after bad is a sure sign of a big loser.
Ultimately, no one here knows what Google will do in the next couple of years with regard to the new TLDs. Some will argue that they will be treated like .info domains and penalized in search results, as they aren't considered "premium Web real estate." I personally agree with the camp that thinks that as Google attempts to deliver more relevant traffic, having your location (or your primary topic) in your TLD can only be a good thing.
But there's no reason you can't have both. You can use your existing .com to promote your corporate identity, as it does now, and utilize your new .NYC domain name to deliver content that is targeted and relevant to NYC locals, for example, neighborhood-based content. This was the same recommendation we made to our client at Keller Williams NYC. I'm posting the same advice here because I'd like to see it become the new "best practice," because to me, it certainly makes the most sense.
-
Hi Alan!
I'm with Egol on this - if you're going to go to the trouble of changing to a new domain (and all of the redirect, branding and citation cleanup this would involve) I would only suggest doing so for a better domain than the one you're mentioning. Other community members may have differing opinions on this, but the hyphenated domain doesn't strike me as strong enough to make all the work involved in switching domains seem like a good tradeoff.
-
Right now you have a problem with your best clients typing in NYCOfficeSpaceLeader.com or NYC-Office-Space-Leader.com or NYC_Office_Space_Leader.com (and a host of typos).
If you go to the proposed domain your best clients will be typing... MetroManhatten.nyc and MetroManhatten.com and Metro-Manhatten.com.
Those domains, to me, are like throwing traffic away.
Phone conversations go like this...
Guy: What's your website?
You: Metro hypen Manhattan.NYC
Guy: Huh? MetroHikingManhattan.com?
You: No. M-E-T-R-O hyphen-like-a-minus-sign M-A-N-H-A-T-T-A-N dot com
Guy: huh? can you repeat that ?
You: OMG!
Guy: OMG!
I would make the name of my biz really simple. Get a good .com domain without hypens. I'd be willing to spend good money to get an appropriate domain that anybody will clearly understand on a telephone. If you don't get a .com then whoever owns the .com is going to get lots of your type-in traffic.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO Best Practice for Managing a Businesses NAP with Multiple Addresses
I have a client with multiple business addresses - 3 across 3 states, from an SEO perspective what would be the best approach for displaying a NAP on the website? So far I've read that its best: to get 3 GMB account to point to 3 location pages & use a local phone number as opposed to a 1300 number. Display all 3 locations in the footer, run of site
Local Website Optimization | | jasongmcmahon1 -
Are core pages considered "cornerstones"?
To check that I understand the terminology, "cornerstone articles" are posts (or pages) that have some extensive, detailed, important information about a subject that other blog posts and articles can link to in reference, right? For example, a website for an auto repair shop might have a blog post about what cold weather does to a car's transmission and that post could link to a cornerstone "explainer" article that goes into more detail explaining to car-dummies like me what a transmission even DOES. But are core pages also in this category of cornerstone content? Or are they something entirely different and should be constructed accordingly? By "core pages", I mean the base-level pages about what your business is and does. For the repair shop example, I mean things like an "About Us" page or a "Services" page*. *or broken up into individual pages listing the services related to brakes, engine, wheels, etc. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | BrianAlpert780 -
Does having an embedded Google Map still count as a positive SEO signal?
I know this was true a few years ago, however is there still an advantage to having an embedded map vs. a pop up map in 2017?
Local Website Optimization | | BigChad21 -
Impact of .us vs .com on SEO rankings?
Our website is hosted on www.discovered.us. I have 2 questions: 1: we have had regular feedback a .us domain is negative in SEO and in conversion (customers don't like it). We are thinking of changing domain to: www.dscvrd.com.
Local Website Optimization | | Discovered
Any insights on the impact on our rankings (if any) if we do this? 2: we are focusing our SEO global / USA first but conversions in UK are better. We currently do not have multi-language SEO setup. What would the impact be of implementing www.discovered.co.uk on SEO in UK? Thanks! Gijsbert0 -
Local SEO - Adding the location to the URL
Hi there, My client has a product URL: www.company.com/product. They are only serving one state in the US. The existing URL is ranking in a position between 8-15 at the moment for local searches. Would it be interesting to add the location to the URL in order to get a higher position or is it dangerous as we have our rankings at the moment. Is it really giving you an advantage that is worth the risk? Thank you for your opinions!
Local Website Optimization | | WeAreDigital_BE
Sander0 -
Should I use pipe in title tags for local seo?
Hi, I've created a bunch of landing pages for local areas, reading, windsor, slough etc for the title tag I have for Windsor Emergency Electrician Windsor - BrandName should I be using a pipe in the tag to further help search engines learn/identify the location? Emergency Electrician | Windsor - BrandName Thank you Kev
Local Website Optimization | | otex1 -
Subdomain for ticketing of a client website (how to solve SEO problems caused by the subdomain/domain relationship)
We have a client in need of a ticketing solution for their domain (let's call it www.domain.com) which is on Wordpress - as is our custom ticket solution. However, we want to have full control of the ticketing, since we manage it for them - so we do not want to build it inside their original Wordpress install. Our proposed solution is to build it on tickets.domain.com. This will exist only for selling and issuing the tickets. The question is, is there a way to do this without damaging their bounce rate and SEO scores?
Local Website Optimization | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing
Since customers will come to www.domain.com, then click the ticketing tab and land on tickets.domain.com, Google will see this as a bounce. In reality, customers will not notice the difference as we will clone the look and feel of domain.com Should we perhaps have the canonical URL of tickets.domain.com point to www.domain.com? And also, can we install Webmaster Tools for tickets.domain.com and set the preferred domain as www.domain.com? Are these possible solutions to the problem, or not - and if not, does anyone else have a viable solution? Thank you so much for the help.0 -
Does the Location of my Server effect my SEO?
Does the geographic Location of my Server effect my SEO? HELP US! We are arguing for 3 weeks already. My partner has mentioned multiple times in the past that "since 2013 google does not require your server to be in the country you are targeting for seo"
Local Website Optimization | | DanielBernhardt
And that actually all they care about is if its a good and fast server - not where its physically located in the world. I am a strong believer that the geographic location of your server directly effects your SEO ranking... lets say if you want to target www.google.ru for your seo, best you have a server located in Russia for hosting your website.. WHO IS RIGHT? Choose the winner and base the facts.
If anybody has the correct answer and information to base it on it will help us alot - and maybe even spare some unnecessary violent between us two! we found some articles across the web, sadly they are all dated back to 2012.... Thanks in Advance for all the help guys!0