Is .ca right for your Canadian business?
Canadian companies often grapple with whether they should choose a dot com (.com) domain or a dot ca domain (.ca). Certainly there are advantages for choosing a dot com, however, getting the domain you want can often be challenging, often they’re already taken and might cost a lot to obtain. There are approximately 125 million .com domains, but only around 3 million registered .ca domains.
Using a .ca domain has advantages too, it lets your customers know right away that you’re a Canadian business. This is especially important if you only do business in Canada.
As you can see, we use a .ca domain for our own business here. We had the .com once upon a time, after waiting years for it to expire and paying several hundred dollars for the backorder. Then, due to a billing issue with our domain provider’s strange system, we had it expire, someone bought the drop and they’ve been hanging onto it since (if you’re the owner out there reading this, hi). So, we embraced not having the dot com and moved on using our .ca domain.
One of the main the advantages of having a .ca domain is that, unlike .com domains, there are name protections in place. In our scenario above, if we’d lost our .ca domain, we could apply to CIRA to get it back, something not available with .com domains.
Other advantages include:
Canadians love to do business within Canada whenever possible, your .ca domain lets your customers know that you’re a Canadian business and they can expect billing in Canadian dollars.
Search relevance: Google and other search engines know your business is in Canada and therefore for local SEO it’s better to have a .ca domain.
Dot .ca domains are for Canadians only. There is a Canadian presence requirement, people overseas are not allowed to register a .ca domain.
More credibility than other TLD (top level domains), .ca domains are among the least abused domains, according to internet spam monitoring non-profit SpamHaus.
Comes with free WHOIS privacy to keep your contact details safe and private.
Using a .ca domain could be the right choice for your business. We’d love to help you with questions that you have, just let us know in the comments.