What do you do when you implement perfect keywords – but when it comes time to check your rankings, your website hasn’t moved at all? Here, we show you how a local .melbourne domain name can help you leverage the rankings you deserve.

Why choose a local domain name?

Optimising for your local area means you’re able to draw in high-quality traffic. If you only include the words ‘hair salon’ in your keyword set, the wrong clients may be finding you. Even though your salon is in Melbourne, people are calling from Sydney for an appointment.

Usually, to attract the right customers for you, we’ll simply add a local term to your keywords, meaning you’ll be left with ‘hair salon Melbourne’ instead.

Sometimes, though, these techniques don’t quite work. When this happens, we include the location right in the top-level domain (TLD), which immediately signals to Google where you are. Not only does this have immense value for your SEO, but it also helps your branding too, as potential customers can tell at a glance if you’ll be useful for them.

Just by using .melbourne, our clients have achieved great results

Office Interiors, a fitouts and furniture specialist in Melbourne, came to us after a couple of frustrating attempts at SEO. Their keyword list, which included 20 keywords, simply was not ranking – and it never had.

We attempted an onsite review, cleaned up the backlinks and started a new link building campaign. We thought we’d tried all our usual methods until we considered their domain name. It was not locally optimised.

As the keywords already contained the word ‘Melbourne’, we knew we had to sharpen the company’s local SEO and really signal to the search engines that Office Interiors was a site worth ranking.

Our technical team set the client up with a new domain – officeinteriors.melbourne – that would draw attention to this local business.

And, after setting up a few 301 redirects, which would send all traffic from the old domain straight to the brand new one, we saw the amazing results we were after. We checked the reports and, in only a couple of months, 11 of their 13 keywords were on page 1 (with the other two not far behind). That’s what we call a successful business!

Just by adopting a local domain extension, we were able to help Office Interiors rise to great levels of success. They couldn’t be happier – and neither could we.

If you would like to learn more about how a .melbourne domain could help your business get in touch with our friendly staff at Webcentral.