I’d buy both if the cost was right. If not I’d probably go with the LocationService.com. I know it the less searched of the two but I also have to worry about branding. I think that one sounds better.

Now I have a quick question.

Most domain developers know that Google gives a very healthy exact match bonus to domains that exactly match the search query. Obviously due to the fact that Google views the domain as the brand and authority of that search term.

My question is, when targeting local businesses e.g. “Sydney Limo Hire”. What domain should I target? sydneylimohire.com or limohiresydney.com.

Its obvious that sydneylimohire.com sounds much better, BUT…
Through my research, people searching on Goog for local businesses always type in the service before the location, e.g. “limo Hire Sydney”, an average of 5 times more searches.

Since the exact match bonus is so prevalent in Google, im very tempted to stick to the higher searched exact match domain rather than the better sounding domain.

I hate choosing so i might have to buy both.

If the .com isn’t available (either because it’s too expensive or already being used) another extension can be used to good effect – but it’s a lot of work.

We’ve launched a .info for a UK county (pop 780,000) in the last year starting with a lot of community pages linking to local groups (sports, arts, charities etc) and with a lot of information about the area – chasing long tail search terms.

This has worked well. With proper on page SEO and some good quality links, we ranked very well within 1 year for many geo+keyword items. This built an audience which is growing rapidly.

We’re now able to compete better for more competetive terms and so the emphasis of the site is starting to change to more commercial terms (hotels, jobs, businesses and services).

The .com would have been great for branding, but a non .com can be made to generate an audience which can bear fruit if a medium term development and promotion strategy is used.

There are situations where I would even advocate building a city Geo on a non .com extension.

For example, let’s say there is a small city of say 20,000 people. You would like to build a website for this city, but the city leaders had the foresight to buy the city.com (this happens much less than you may expect), but you can either hand register (not likely) or buy (a better bet) the .net. In my opinion, that would be a solid avenue to build a Geo on an extension other than .com…speaking of cities in the U.S. of course.

Personally, I think .tv, .biz etc.. open some exciting branding opportunities to entrepreneurs on a budget.
The web has entered a less boring era. Non-.Com extensions now offer new adventures. There will be more passinate people willing to take the road less travelled and seek unproven success IMO.

Of course the average American identifies the internet with .com but the average American identifies Failblog.org with .org, Wikipedia.org with .org, ImageShack.us with .us. My point is that in the end it is all about branding your website and that can be done with any extension.

Sometimes, we have to step back and remember that as domain investors and/or developers…we understand where there are advantages in other extensions.

However, to just use America as an example, the average American still overwhelmingly identifies the Internet with .com. Investing in a geodomain dot com is less about direct navigation and more about securing the best brand with which to develop your business.

Does this mean you can’t build a solid site on something other than .com…not at all. You certainly can, but you have a much better opportunity for long-term success, in my opinion, with a city.com or any kind of geodomain .com.

The magazine article overall is really good. Does it have a few flaws like type in traffic, yes. Hopefully over the next few days as it unfolds it will give a good overall guide to Geo domain investing.