SEO Value in Switching to ".NYC" Domain?

[Kingalan1]

Recently " .NYC" domains have become available for purchase to New York City based businesses.

I own and operate a New York City commercial real estate firm, nyc-officespace-leader.com. New domain would be www.metro-manhattan.nyc

Our existing domain has been in use for seven years.would there be an SEO benefit to transferring our site to .NYC domain? Or would a new domain kill our domain rank?

Thanks, Alan

[EGOL]

Right now you have a problem with your best clients typing in NYCOfficeSpaceLeader.com or NYC-Office-Space-Leader.com or NYC_Office_Space_Leader.com (and a host of typos).

If you go to the proposed domain your best clients will be typing... MetroManhatten.nyc and MetroManhatten.com and Metro-Manhatten.com.

Those domains, to me, are like throwing traffic away.

Phone conversations go like this...

Guy: What's your website?

You: Metro hypen Manhattan.NYC

Guy:  Huh?  MetroHikingManhattan.com?

You:  No.     M-E-T-R-O hyphen-like-a-minus-sign M-A-N-H-A-T-T-A-N dot com

Guy:  huh?  can you repeat that ?

You:  OMG!

Guy:  OMG!

I would make the name of my biz really simple.  Get a good .com domain without hypens.  I'd be willing to spend good money to get an appropriate domain that anybody will clearly understand on a telephone.      If you don't get a .com then whoever owns the .com is going to get lots of your type-in traffic.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Alan!

I'm with Egol on this - if you're going to go to the trouble of changing to a new domain (and all of the redirect, branding and citation cleanup this would involve) I would only suggest doing so for a better domain than the one you're mentioning. Other community members may have differing opinions on this, but the hyphenated domain doesn't strike me as strong enough to make all the work involved in switching domains seem like a good tradeoff.

[The_Sage]

I ran your existing site through the Moz platform here and discovered a domain authority of 24 for your existing domain. While this isn't awful, it's not so great that you'd want to hold on to it with an ironclad grip. Remember -- throwing good money after bad is a sure sign of a big loser.

Ultimately, no one here knows what Google will do in the next couple of years with regard to the new TLDs. Some will argue that they will be treated like .info domains and penalized in search results, as they aren't considered "premium Web real estate." I personally agree with the camp that thinks that as Google attempts to deliver more relevant traffic, having your location (or your primary topic) in your TLD can only be a good thing.

But there's no reason you can't have both. You can use your existing .com to promote your corporate identity, as it does now, and utilize your new .NYC domain name to deliver content that is targeted and relevant to NYC locals, for example, neighborhood-based content. This was the same recommendation we made to our client at Keller Williams NYC. I'm posting the same advice here because I'd like to see it become the new "best practice," because to me, it certainly makes the most sense.

[Kingalan1]

As a real estate brokerage firm our business is local in nature. If we can get improved ranking for such terms as "New York City office space" it would help our business immensely.

Your suggestion of using both .com and .NYC is very good. 
Thanks,
Alan

[MiriamEllis]

Hi All:)

Popping back in here with a little proviso. While I think The Sage's suggestion is creative, I would strongly stipulate that if you do choose to go with a multi-domain approach, your NAP (name, address, phone) must reside on only one of the two websites. And do not use the second domain in any of your citation building. You do not want Google getting mixed up finding the same basic contact details on two different websites - it can create a nightmare of merged and duplicate listings, negatively impacting the clarity of your citations and the ranking power they provide. As you can tell, I'm not a big fan of multi-site approaches for local businesses in most cases, because of these risks, and if you do decide to go with this route, do be careful to run the second site as a completely separate entity that does not share basic NAP with the main, local site. Hope this advice is helpful!