Australian/Canadian Domains: Should you choose a .com.au, .ca, or .com for your store?

Australian/Canadian Domains: Should you choose a .com.au, .ca, or .com for your store?

If you’re doing business in Australia or Canada, an Australian or Canadian domain name with a .com.au or .ca extension (e.g., domain.com.au/.ca) is an invaluable asset. It tells visitors that you are an Australian/Canadian business which can give them confidence and trust in buying from you.

That’s because:

  1. You need to be a resident of that country, and most probably have a Business Number or a Trademark to register one.
  2. Your domain name must be relevant to your business.
  3. Search engines like Google Australia/Canada and Yahoo! Australia/Canada can often give precedence to Australian/Canadian sites in search engine results by your country’s web surfers.
  4. You can promote the .com.au/.ca domain offline too – on your business cards, in brochures and any newspaper/magazine/other advertising you do.

For Australians, if you are buying a .com.au domain we often recommend to customers that you also buy the equivalent .net.au domain name to make it as easy as possible for customers to find you, and prevent competitors or others from registering it before you get the chance. If your business name is generic, there may be many businesses in your country who meet the criteria to register a name and in those situations the domain name registry allocates domains on a first-come-first-served basis.

You can still be successful with a .com in Australia, Canada, and anywhere else.

If your website has a .com domain name however, your store can still rank well in Australian/Canadian search engines as well as the rest of the world. International .com domains often rank well worldwide compared to Australian domains which can be very useful if you are hoping to sell your products online internationally. You can also tell search engines like Google that you are an Australian/Canadian website through the ‘Regional Settings’ in tools like Google Search Console to ensure your website is picked up appropriately by your country’s search engines.

We recommend registering the .com domain of your website at the same time as registering your .com.au/.ca as there are many cases where random users buy those domains to keep them hostage and await payment from that company to release those domains.

Note the information in the article above is correct at time of writing (June, 23 2018) and is subject to change.

 

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