gTLDs or ccTLDs – What to Choose for Your Website?

Choosing a proper TLD is as important as choosing a domain name. However, many people do not give enough importance to TLDs without knowing that it can make a difference in their online marketing efforts. In this article, we're discussing gTLDs vs ccTLDs and the importance of choosing the appropriate one for your website.

gTLD A generic top-level domain, commonly referred to as gTLD is one that is not tied to any specific country and is generic. Examples of gTLDs are.com,.gov,.net,.org, etc. Of these,.com is the most popularly used gTLD - nearly 50% of websites use.com followed by.org and.net. These TLDs are not targeted to a specific geographic area and they are applicable to any location. There are multiple advantages and disadvantages of using gTLDs. Here is the list:

Advantages With generic TLDs, your website can get traffic from multiple geographic locations and proper optimization ensures good/better global search engine rankings and helps attract visitors. Many search engines trust the websites that have.com and.org, as their domain extensions. Thus, a gTLD is likely to help in improving search engine rankings of a website. Disadvantages If the primary goal of your website is to gain the local audience, a ccTLD is likely to be more helpful – because, the local audience prefers local ccTLDs to gTLDs.

ccTLD ccTLD stands for country code top level domain. A ccTLD is aimed to indicate a country specific or country code TLD. TLDs are domain extensions specific to a particular country. In general, these are two letter TLDs like.ca,.us,.uk, etc. These are useful if your targeted audience are from a specific country. This also brings organic traffic to your website by improving search engine rankings in the country based search engine results.

Following are advantages and disadvantages of using ccTLDs: Advantages People mainly use ccTLDs for targeting the local audience and to bring traffic to the websites. People tend to click websites with local domain extension, as they feel that they are more trust worthy than the other domains. This increases the credibility and helps in easy branding of the website.

Disadvantages If you are planning to reach out/take your website to global audience, a ccTLD does not offer flexibility. gTLDs are more favored both among global audience as well as search engines. By default, many people try to go for gTLD, while purchasing a domain. ccTLDs are considered only when the domain name with a gTLD that has already been purchased by someone else, or their website exclusively serves their respective audience in the geography. However, when you are choosing a TLD, it is recommended to make a choice from the perspective of your online marketing strategy.

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