National not international domain name does it matter?

[McTaggart]

I am working on a website and have noticed managers own only the relevant national domain name and not  the .com domain name.

Does this matter from an SEO perspective?

[mememax]

I don't think this matters under an SEO perspective because you have the best TLD for each market, however many users may try to make direct traffic to the .com site so it will make sense to avoid other people buying that site and create a tiny page trying to deliver that traffic to other sites than yours. Even if you don't want to create that site I'll better prevent other ones to make it. Anytime you want you may consider creating the english focused website on that TLD.

[Aleyda]

Hi Luke,

If the website is targeting to a specific country then having a ccTLD is an additional signal of relevance for it (unless the US, where typically the domain used de-facto is .com).

Nonetheless, if the Website is targeting to a worldwide audience (let's say a Website in English targeting to any user who speaks that language, for which the country doesn't matter) then it would be more relevant to have a generic domain (like the .com), since the Website is not country targeted.

Thanks,

Aleyda