Does .Melbourne or .Sydney TLD extensions have any real benefits ?

About a year back TLD extensions with ".Melbourne" and ".Sydney" got introduced in Australian Markets. Taking cues from my previous blog post on Common SEO Myths, I would again like to make this very clear that TLD extensions or domain names have a negligible positive effect (if any) on your Search Ranking.

There are many Digital Marketing and Domain name resellers trying to spread wrong information about local ranking benefits which ".Melbourne" or ".Sydney" extensions offer. If ranking on Google was so easy, everyone would have bought different domains for each of their products and that would have been a ripper idea.

Have you heard of a local salon to have following domain names ?

• Menshaircut.Melbourne
• Womenstrimming.Sydney
• Menshairspa.Melbourne

No, never would that be the case. Few things which go terribly wrong here are:

1) Even if we assume or create a hypothesis that TLD extensions helped in ranking or was a ranking signal, why would hyperlocal services like Pizza Shops, Coffee Shops, Salons, etc would like to rank on Melbourne which is so vague? Melbourne Metropolitan region is vast and has so many suburbs. Same goes with Sydney.

If the argument is that ".Melbourne" or ".Sydney" can be used to rank businesses which are specifically in CBD, then also this argument does not stand valid. Imagine you are in Melbourne CBD and need a coffee, what would you do ? If you are tech savvy just open Google and type coffee shops around me. If you are not tech savvy you will still open and search coffee shops on let's suppose Queen Street, Melbourne CBD. It's quite obvious that Melbourne term is interchangeable and searcher knows this, hence he/she would make special efforts to get results from CBD.

Image source: Neil Patel

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