Over To You: Is A .com Web Address Always Best For A DJ Site?

Phil Morse | Founder & Tutor
Read time: 2 mins
Last updated 30 August, 2017

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How important is it to have a .com for your DJ website? Is it OK to have your country, or some other suffix instead? That’s the subject of today’s reader letter.

Digital DJ Tips member Paul Velocity write: “I’ve been running as a part time DJ for 15 years in the UK and I have recently moved to the USA. My online presence, website and public email address have all centred around a co.uk web domain address. I have managed to get booked out here but it feels a bit weird giving out contact details with a co.uk in the URL and email.

“Do you think I should migrate my entire site to the .com address, redirect traffic and emails where needed and gradually phase out the co.uk? Running the .com and co.uk in parallel, essentially mirroring each other but with slightly different tailored content? Keep the co.uk address but redirect .com traffic to it so I can use a .com address to promote myself here? Or just keep the co.uk and use the UK angle as a novelty/niche to help break into the scene?”

Digital DJ Tips says:

First Paul, congratulations on your move stateside, all the best. It worked for Pete Tong!

Anyway, it’s an interesting conundrum. The stock advice is to stick with .com whenever you can. People will always search for the .com first. However, as you say, there’s a certain “cool” factor when it comes to being a European DJ, so you have to weigh that up, but on balance, I’d always stick with the .com (after all, we are .com but we’re Europe-based).

I wouldn’t tailor content for each site or anything like that: Funnily enough, duplicating content on two sites can actually harm your SEO. If it were me, I’d move lock, stock and barrel to the .com, but take some SEO advice or do your research to ensure you don’t lose any of your visibility on Google when you make the (online) move.

It’s an unusual question though, so I’d like to throw this one formally over to the readers, too.

So, over to you! What would you do in Paul’s situation? Have you had to change your geographical we address for any reason? Are .coms necessarily always better? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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