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
-
Local SEO Over Optimization
We are targeting a bunch of services for our local business that works in and around their location. I'm concerned about over optimization and need some guidance on whether these points should be resolved. The company is based in a city and works mostly in the city but also in the surrounding areas. Currently, the site has 6 services pages (accessible via main nav) targeting the same location i.e. “Made Up Service London”, “Imaginary Service London” (with URLs and H1 tags etc. in place containing this location). However this is soon going to become 9 services pages, I am concerned that the repetition of this one location is starting to look spammy, especially as its where the company is based. Initially, I also wanted pages targeting the same services in other nearby areas. For example “Made Up Service Surrey”, “Imaginary Service Essex”. This has not happened as the info available has been too sporadic. I was going to add links to relevant case studies into these pages to beef up the content and add interest. To that end, we came up with case studies, but after a while, I noticed that these are also largely focused on the primary location. So out of 32 case studies, we have 19 focused on the primary location again with URL’s and H1 tags etc containing the location keyword. So in total, we have 25 pages optimized for the location (soon to be 28 and more if further case studies are added). My initial feeling was that the inclusion of pages targeting services in other locations would legitimize what we have done with the main pages. But obviously we have not got these pages in place and I question whether we ever will. What is my best course of action moving forward?
Local Website Optimization | | GrouchyKids1 -
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 -
Should Multi Location Businesses "Local Content Silo" Their Services Pages?
I manage a site for a medical practice that has two locations. We already have a location page for each office location and we have the NAP for both locations in the footer of every page. I'm considering making a change to the structure of the site to help it rank better for individual services at each of the two locations, which I think will help pages rank in their specific locales by having the city name in the URL. However, I'm concerned about diluting the domain authority that gets passed to the pages by moving them deeper in the site's structure. For instance, the services URLs are currently structured like this: www.domain.com/services/teeth-whitening (where the service is offered in each of the two locations) Would it make sense to move to a structure more like www.domain.com/city1name/teeth-whitening www.domain.com/city2name/teeth-whitening Does anyone have insight from dealing with multi-location brands on the best way to go about this?
Local Website Optimization | | formandfunctionagency1 -
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 -
Multi location silo seo technique
A physical therapy company has 8 locations in one city and 4 locations in another with plans to expand. I've seen two methods to approach this. The first I feel is sloppy and that is the individual url for each location that points to from the location pages on the main domain. The second is to use the silo technique incorporated with metro scale addition. You have the main domain with the number of silos (individual stores) and each silo has its own content (what they do at each store is pretty much the same). My question is should the focus of each silo, besides making sure there is no duplicate copy, to increase their own hyperlocal outreach? Focus on social, reviews, content curated for the specific location. How would you attack this problem?
Local Website Optimization | | Ohmichael1 -
Image URLs changed 3 times after using a CDN - How to Handle for SEO?
Hi Mozzers,
Local Website Optimization | | emerald
Hoping for your advice on how to handle the SEO effects an image URL change, that changed 3 times, during the course of setting up a CDN over a month period, as follows: (URL 1) - Original image URL before CDN:www.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg (URL 2) - First CDN URL (without CNAME alias - using WPEngine & their own CDN):
username.net-dns.com/images/abc.jpg (URL 3) - Second CDN URL (with CNAME alias - applied 3 weeks later):
cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg When we changed to URL 2, our image rankings in the Moz Tool Pro Rankings dropped from 80% to 5% (the one with the little photo icons). So my questions for recovery are: Do I need to add a 301 redirect/Canonical tag from the old image URL 1 & 2 to URL 3 or something else? Do I need to change my image sitemap to use cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg instead of www.? Thanks in advance for your advice.0 -
Sub-Domain Google Search Nested under main Domain?
Hello, I have a strange issue that I have not come across before:My subdomain is: michigan.dogdaycare.com. Some of the Keyword searches show our subdomain being nested under the main domain for Google searches instead of being indexed individually. Example search term: Dogtopia Bloomfield https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=dogtopia+bloomfield -This will show two subdomain links nested under the main domain Example search term: Dogtopia Birmingham https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=dogtopia+birmingham -This shows the subdomain showing correctly in searches and not nested. Any idea as to how to fix this? Thanks in advance!
Local Website Optimization | | dogtopiamichigan0 -
Yoast Local SEO Reviews/Would it work for me?
Hi everyone, I'm looking for some feedback on Yoast Local SEO, and if you think it'd work for our site. www.kempruge.com. Our site is a wordpress site, and there's nothing about it, off the top of my head, that makes me think it wouldn't work, but I've been wrong before. We do use All-In-One SEO, not the Yoast plugin, so I'm not sure if that's compatible.or would cause a problem? (The reason we use All-In-One and not Yoast is because that's what we had when I got here, and I'm worried what would happen if we switched). Also, we have three offices, and I need to be able to do local seo for all three. I know Yoast says it supports multiple offices, but I'd feel more comfortable if someone on here let me know from his/her experience that it did. Anything else you want to add about Yoast Local, I'm all ears! Thanks, Ruben
Local Website Optimization | | KempRugeLawGroup0