OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Research from 1&1 Internet of 1,000 New York City consumers revealed New Yorker perceptions and expectations for the new .nyc domains.
Some Key Findings:
- 82% of NYC consumers experience frustration when trying to find a local business with the top annoyances being incorrect suggestions (36%) and getting results from around the country (36%)
- New Yorkers can correctly identify images of NYC an average of 86% of the time, but NYC business websites only 15%.
- Staten Island residents prove to have the most faith in NYC businesses with 58.2% claiming NYC businesses are the “best businesses they have used.”
Check out the below infographic to learn more about New Yorkers perception of this new online marketing strategy for local businesses.
Surveys are easily biased by the way you phrase the questions. The real question is are the majority of searches by New Yorkers for local businesses? I don’t think so. If they actually had search data, you’ll find that New Yorkers search for the same kinds of stuff everyone else does… a mixture of businesses, facts, figures, pop culture, and product information.
Open ended questions are harder to tabulate, but a question like “What do you think the biggest problem is when searching the Internet?”, is far less biased than “Do you experience frustration when you search for local businesses and get results outside New York?”
The key is, does Google know for sure you are looking for something local? I tend to think the only time they know for sure is if you ask for a town, zip code, street name, etc. Without such markers, Google will continue to mix local and non-local results.
By clearly indexing .NYC sites as being local, that does’t help ambiguous searching, where you don’t know whether the searcher is looking for a local result or not.
I live in Staten Island. The funny thing is some Staten Islanders are so close to New Jersey, we seek out New Jersey businesses more than New York businesses.
So in my case, having an abundance of NYC sites in my results would frustrate me.
You are correct. Polls are difficult to conduct so you can get real and usable results.
This was done by a registrar so it was not impartial.
wrong long reply, and then had error on reply form that corrupted post. oh well.
Will sum it up in few words.
I done SEO for long time now, and for me it will come down to:
Value that Google will atribute to .nyc domain name. Ignoring .nyc branding, better name for busines, and value of domain and other things, just keeping SEO as pure factor.
I will bet that within 6month – 1 year , .nyc domains will come up marginally better then .com domains for new york. All other aspects even (links, posts, optimization). Within 2-3 years, i am expecting a very significant .nyc domain name advantage in SEO respect, over .com (and other extensions).
Just saw yesterday as walking around Union Square, a new wine store opening up. SomeGoodWines.com , horrible. He could have gotten .nyc that would be 100 times better. But he didnt know, and now he is opening store in ultra premium area with a very sub bar business name.