Which Domain Extension Is Best For Me?

So you’re serious about launching a Site for your Business. That’s excellent, you should be, it’s one of the most powerful tools you have access to. You’ve already picked the perfect domain name, and now you just need to whack an extension on the end and it’ll be all yours.

But then you look at your options, and everything comes to a halt. There’s so many of them, and none of them tell you anything about what they do or which one you should pick.

In this blog we’ll be going through the options on offer and discussing which one is the best option for you.

The Homegrown Hero

Up first we’ll look at the old faithful, .com.au. The local version of the more universal .com, this is the option most Small Businesses will go with, and for good reason. Everyone who’s ever used the internet for any length of time will have come across a .com domain extension, it makes up the vast majority of the internet.

This extension offers familiarity to the browsers you want to turn into Customers, it’s something they know and trust. That legitimacy is great news for your Business, you don’t want your customers being scared off by something strange or unusual.

Now the drawback of this extension is that ANYONE can get one, so registering that perfect domain name may prove impossible. Having been in constant use since the dawn of the internet, many domain names just won’t be available. This brings us to the triple advantages of the .com.au extension.

That .au identifies a Site as being from Australia, and you’ll almost certainly have seen it plenty of times before. The reason this helps you snag a good domain name is that adding .au onto an extension makes it a completely new domain.

Say you want to register a domain for your store, Larry’s Pizza, but larryspizza.com is already taken. This can be solved by registering larryspizza.com.au, a completely new domain.

Even if you’re not struggling with your name, there are other advantages to adding a .au to your domain. While absolutely anyone can register a normal .com extension, snagging a .au requires having a registered ABN. This means your customers, presuming they’re also here in Australia, know that you too are local, and who doesn’t prefer a local Business?

Finally there’s the neat little bonus of Sites with a .au extension being ranked higher when searching in Australia. Not only do you make your site more trustworthy, you make it more likely to be seen.

Extensions For Going Global

Now you might be a local Business, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you only sell here. If you’re setting your sights a little further abroad, you may want a domain that appeals to a foreign market. This is where that universal .com may be preferable, if you plan on servicing all parts of the world equally, a domain with universal appeal is obviously an advantage.

If the markets you’re appealing to are a little more focused however, you might then want to consider registering more local extensions. If you’re aiming squarely at New Zealand for example, it makes sense to snag yourself a .nz extension. That same trustworthiness you get from a .au applies equally to the local equivalents around the world, so take advantage of it.

Options From Further Afield

Now so far we’ve stuck to .com and its derivatives, but there are plenty more to choose from when you’re domain name shopping.

The .org extension was created with non-profit organisations in mind, and that’s still its primary use. If you’re running a for-profit business there’s not really any need to mess about with this extension.

Similarly, .net was originally created with a specific purpose in mind, but in the years since its inception it has come to function identically to .com. As the second most popular extension on the internet, it offers nearly as much familiarity, and can be a useful fallback for ensuring you get your preferred domain name.

If you see .gov or .edu you can skip over those, they’re for the government and schools respectively.

The .co extension is an interesting one, being created in 2010 to circumvent the aforementioned lack of available .com names. Short for company or corporation, it is made for businesses, and has achieved global recognition as such. A small hiccup with this extension is that it is also used to designate the country of Colombia, so check if that will be a problem before you snatched it up.

At last we come to the rarely used but still valid .biz extension. A shortening of business, this is another one made specifically with businesses in mind. Its relative scarcity of adopters means it tends to be cheaper to purchase, but it carries with it a certain reputation for being lower quality and less trustworthy. This shouldn’t be your first choice if your customers interact directly with your Site.

So there you have everything you should need to make a decision on a domain extension for your shiny new website. There’s a lot out there, but if you consider your situation carefully you’ll probably find that one of them stands out as the best fit for you.