As you may have heard, the .law domain extension became available to credentialed lawyers as of October 12th. There are a lot of front-end promises in terms of what buying a domain name with this extension can do for your web presence – and ultimately your SEO. Don’t believe those promises.
The newly-released .law domain extensions will not automatically rank higher than .com domains – plain and simple. Two years ago Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, quickly dismissed the idea:
“Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that’s your choice, but you shouldn’t register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you’ll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.”
When it comes to advancing SEO efforts, consumers become easy targets because we’re all looking for that “silver bullet”. The truth is credibility and domain authority can only be built with a strategic approach and quality content over time.
If there is one reason to buy a .law domain name, it would be for a vanity campaign. However, before doing so, make sure to research other relevant .com vanity domains. Depending on your geographical area or area of practice, many are still available.
Here’s an example: DenverInjury.law
The only value (if any) would be to use this domain only for vanity campaign purposes (namely in TV advertising). However, a better and move valuable domain would be DenverInjuryLawyer.com.
The bottom line is: don’t be suckered into this. There are many, far more valuable things you can do for your web presence and SEO. Focus on what’s important – building credibility, generating quality content, establishing domain authority – ‘silver bullet’ promises. They don’t exist.
Not sure where you rank these days? Our SEO experts are happy to give you a FREE and confidential evaluation of your current web presence. Give us a call to find out where you stand 888.461.1016.