Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about a ranking preference given to sites that use country level domain names and explained how that compares to non-country domain names. The question occurred in the SEO Office Hours podcast.
ccTLD Aka Country Code Domain Names
Domain names that are specific to countries are called ccTLDs (Country Code Top Level Domains). These are domain names that target specific countries. Examples of these ccTLDs are .de (Germany), .in (India) and .kr (Korea). These kinds of domain names don’t target specific languages, they only target Internet users in a specific country.
Some ccTLDs are treated by Google for ranking purposes as if they are regular Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), which are domains that are not specific to a country. A popular example is .io, which technically is a ccTLD (pertaining to the British Indian Ocean Territory) but because of how it’s used, Google treats it like a regular gTLD (generic top level domain).
Ranking Boosts For ccTLDs
The question that Gary Illyes answered was about the ranking boost given to ccTLDs.
This is the question:
“When a Korean person searches Google in Korean, does a com.kr domain or a .com domain do better?”
Gary Illyes answered:
“Good question. Generally speaking the local domain names, in your case .kr, tend to do better because Google Search promotes content local to the user.”
A lot of people want to rank better in a specific country and one of the best practices for doing that is to register a domain name that is specific to the country. Google will give it a ranking boost over other sites that are not explicitly targeting a specific country.
Gary continued his answer by explaining the ranking boost of a ccTLD over a generic top level domain (gTLD), like .com, .net and so on.
This is Gary’s explanation:
“That’s not to say that a .com domain can’t do well, it can, but generally .kr has a little more benefit, albeit not too much. “
Targeting Country Versus Targeting Language
Lastly, Gary mentioned that targeting a user’s language has more impact than the domain name.
He continued his answer:
“If the language of a site matches the user’s query language, that probably has more impact than the domain name itself.”
A benefit of targeting a language is that a site is able regardless of the country that a user is searching from whereas the country code top level domain name targets a country.
Something that Gary didn’t mention is that using a ccTLD can inspire user trust from searchers whose country matches the country that the domain name is targeting and because of that searchers on Google may be more inclined to click on a search result that uses the geotargeted ccTLD.
If a user is in Korea they may feel that a .kr domain is meant specifically for them. If a searcher is in Australia they may feel more inclined to click on a .au domain name.
Listen to the podcast answer from the 3:35 minute mark:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Dean Drobot