A lot of clients ask us how important their domain name is in the SEO of their website. Domain names certainly have some SEO value but it is a bit more complicated than that.
Having something along the lines of www.graphics-brochures-designs.com used to be thought of as the best type of domain name you could get. The name states what business you are in, It features the keywords that your potential customers might be looking for and one would assume that it is going to appear relevant to Google and therefore feature highly in its rankings.
However, Google as always, worked out what companies were doing with domains such as these and quickly released multiple updates, which largely de-valued exact match domain names.
Now it’s all about brand. They’re looking to provide the results that are most relevant to the user and the sites most likely to give them a good experience. So the best thing you can do for your business and your brand is use it as your domain name, and Google might eventually see you as one of their top, relevant companies.
The other consideration is if you need the .com. suffix or not. Many people still think .com is the only suffix to a web address and will automatically type that at the end of a name without thinking.
If you are an American business then you most definitely need to go for .com or .net, while .co.uk is preferable if you do most of your trade in the UK. Org is specifically for an organisation while .edu is for an educational establishment. Getting inbound links to your website from .org or .edu websites is particularly desirable but hard to do.
There’s also a lot of value in making sure you have your country code top level domains too. It’s great for SEO to have both the .com and .co.uk (with redirection to the .com) if you’re based in the United Kingdom. So if it’s a new brand, make sure you buy up everything you need before someone else does!