I get asked this all the time, as you might expect, so here’s some info on making the right choice for your site. 

First of all, .ie is one of the safest domain extensions in Europe. Fact. Overall, It has a very good reputation of having strong authenticity. This is owing to the fact that you must submit paperwork like business registration details and identification in order to secure it. Upon registration you have guaranteed your potential visitor or indeed customer that your business truly is Irish, which of course helps with authenticity and reputation.

There are very few spammy websites with the .ie extension too. If you’re an Irish business and are targeting Irish customers exclusively, then you should really be choosing .ie. There really isn’t any argument against that. The .ie extension gives you some power in localised searches. For instance, if you do decide to use a .ie extension, you have the “potential to show up” in local searches pretty quickly because a .ie will have some power over a .com for localised searches. I emphasize the phrase “Potential to show up”, because it very much depends on your site build, quality, speed, mobile friendliness etc. High ranking in Google then is a whole other story.

A .com extension, we all know, is the global standard. If you have your sights set on the bigger picture and intend to promote and sell internationally then yes, .com is the way to go. It also tends to be cheaper to buy .com extension domains than .ie. People are surprised by that sometimes but nevertheless it’s true. If you are an Irish business and are targeting an international market as well as a national market then ideally, you buy both domain extensions for your business. This way your site is built on one or the other and then a redirection can be put in place, .ie redirects to .com or vice versa. That way you promote your business as either .ie or .com and someone gets to it either way. For instance, www.writeinsite.com will get you to www.writeinsite.ie. 

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