Should I Get The .CA or .CO Version?

I'm going to be starting a site providing an online service.

I'm located in Canada myself but I do not want to be limited to just this market.

Will a .ca rank well in the US? Or am I better off getting the .co domain.

.com, .net and .org are of course taken.

Personally I'd say do one of two things. And personally my preference would be option 1, that's why I put it first

1 - buy both .co and .ca, test things out, I can add more about that later if you want.

Registering two different TLD's of the same name isn't that much for 1 year; but if you don't want to go that route...

2 - get the .co if you're not interested in or targetting specifically to CAN. Slightly better IMHO.

.co and .ca are technically both ccTLD's, so theoretically the search engines will rank the names primarily based on how well you set up and optimise them, build backlinks, drive traffic, et cetera.

O Canada - gregs.

Get the .co if you don't want to be limited to the canada market.

If you aren't targeting only Canada go for the co

Okay, I have a couple minutes, so here is why I would reg both TLD's.

.CO is easier to get than .CA. You have to meet certain eligibility requirements to reg a .CA (one is living in Canada, one is having a registered corporation in CAN, another is something to do with the Queen of England's offices or something like that, there are others, and they periodically audit certain names). So, since you can get the .CA version, and it's a fairly well-known extension in CAN, I'd grab it.

But at the same time, .CO is gaining popularilty (kind of like how .INFO did for awhile when it first rolled out, but .INFO stayed so aggressive that they kind of turned themselves into a less desirable TLD)

.CO is a good candidate for typo traffic. I kind of think they're going to end up being like .TV's - a ccTLD that results in a shorter name to remember, and will in the long run be somewhat viable.

That's the big picture. The short-term picture is that if you register both, you have options:

set up a site on the .CO and redirect the .CA to the .CO or vice versa

or you could do A/B testing between the .CO and the .CA

or you could have two radically different sites

or use one as a testbed for changes to the other (private password-protected site that the "public" can't see) - you could test changes on that one and then promote those changes to the other

I'd just buy both and mainpage the .co if it was me.

Registering both of them would be beneficial in the long run. If you don't target specifically Canada, run the main site on the .co domain and do a redirect on the .ca.

.co will be much more easier to rank

peterbruce said:

If you aren't targeting only Canada go for the co

Click to expand...

I agree with peter, Go for the .Co as you donot want to limit your service to canada only.

.co is intuitive and catchy too.

Another vote for .co especially if you don't want to limit yourself to Canadian market.

.CA sounds too Canadian. Although .co is also for ccTLD for Colombia but its perceived as "company" among most internet users.

Mountaineer said:

Another vote for .co especially if you don't want to limit yourself to Canadian market.

.CA sounds too Canadian. Although .co is also for ccTLD for Colombia but its perceived as "company" among most internet users.

Click to expand...

Yes, they are specifically branding .CO as "worldwide"; I can't find the full nexus agreement right now, but the first time I read it, it was *very* brief (that's a good thing in terms of restrictions). .CA is alot harder to get, their nexus is much longer and they enforce it fairly aggressively.

Personally, I prefer .CO over .CA if I *had* to pick one. But once you're down the road of ccTLD's, it's worth looking at a bit more in-depth (and Yanks, remember, 90% of the .CA population is massed within a one-hour drive to your Northern border )

So if someone has an opportunity to snag a harder-to-get country code TLD, I generally recommend getting it along with a few other extensions that are available.

Final thought - check with whatever registrar you're going through. Many registrars agree to lock in your renewals at the price you pay for the original registration for as long as your initial registration is.

So, in this example, I would grab the .CO for 3-6 years and the .CA for 2-4 years.

There may be SEO boosts to longer lifetimes on an initial reg over time, I've read and tested and talked with a number of people on both sides of the fence that I can't tell you my opinion any more I gave up worrying about it a long time ago.

Go Leafs!

Thanks for the feedback guys! I think I will end up buying both and then do the redirect.