You are a home contractor. You are great at building dreams. You craft things with your hands every day. If you are like many home contractors, that doesn’t include building websites or an online presence. In fact, you might be wondering what a top-level domain is, why you need one, and what the benefits are. If that’s the case, don’t worry.

Read on, and you’ll find out everything you need to know.

What Is a Top Level Domain?

Top-level domains are domain names that include your name, a full stop, and the TLD (top-level domain).  The top-level domain part is actually the part of the name that follows the final full stop, e.g. the “dot com” or “dot net” part, also called the extension. The important thing to remember about these types of domains is that they aren’t subdomains; in other words, they don’t look like ‘yoursite.someothersite.com.’ We’ve all seen the websites with URLs that include ‘Wix’ and “weebly.” Believe me, this is not the type of web address your contracting business wants or needs as part of your marketing strategy.

Not All TLD’s Created Equal

While you may think that any domain name will do, the truth is, there is a hierarchy in terms of the value of your top-level domain. .com, .org, .net and .biz are some of the oldest TLD’s out there, and they are great choices. As are location specific TLD’s like .ca or .us.

A range of new TLDs including .build, .builders and .contractors have all become available lately, and all of them would be good choices for a home contracting business, so look around before you jump at the first domain that resembles your company name.

Why Are Top Level Domains Important?

There are several reasons why it is critical to have a top-level domain for your company’s construction website. Here are a few:

• Search engines like Google and Yahoo rank TLD’s higher than subdomains, and they tend to give more weight and higher rankings to TLD’s that are registered for a long time.
• A top-level domain is the minimum psychological element you need on the web to be taken seriously by customers. Customers don’t necessarily need you to have a big flashy website, but if you are using a subdomain, you might as well not have a website at all.
• When you have a TLD, you can get an email address that uses your domain, instead of Gmail or outlook.com. Having an email address that uses your own domain looks more professional, and is another psychological trust trigger for the web.

In a nutshell, top-level domains add weight to your website, both in terms of search engines and for visitors to your site.

Small Price to Pay for Reputation

The best news about top-level domains is that they cost just a few dollars per year, depending on the type of TLD you want. You can buy a TLD long before you build a website, but if you want to use a website as a reputation-building tool, then you really cannot do that without a TLD.

Whether you register yours yourself, or have a web design company do it on your behalf, there’s no time like the present, and with the cost so low, there’s no reason not to have your own TLD, and all the benefits that go along with that.