PALM BEACH – My son’s car arrived this morning and delivery has been confirmed via email. We had an agreement that I was sending the car as a gift from South Florida to Georgia, but mom was taking care of the transport fee and choosing the shipper and scheduling it; she chose Ship.Cars, a vehicle transport “marketplace” which is using a new and different domain name ending, likely to improve the chances of being found online.
Ship.Cars is what would be considered a “premium new gTLD domain name” with the “.cars” extension being one of the heftiest in price, around $2,099.00 per year if you shop around diligently; GoDaddy sells them for $2,799.99 –a year.
Ship.Cars is using the new URL not just for their website but also for their email alerts which arrive from notifications@ship.cars so this isn’t just a domain name forwarder, framed website, or paid search campaign grab (according to SEMRush, they do not even use PPC to get found), this is complete and full use of their premium “.cars” domain asset.
Interestingly for readers to hear (being that I had the opportunity), I asked specifically about the concern of the “URL” in the shopping process from a “consumer perspective” and whether or not the odd, interesting or different URL ending played any role at all in the decision-making process of choosing this particular company which than farms out the lead to various shippers who make the haul.
The answer was no.
They found the shipper on the Internet; the URL ending in “.cars” was of absolutely no thought or concern whatsoever, and the decision-making process was then simply on price.
About The Author: John Colascione is Chief Executive of Internet Marketing Services Inc. He specializes in Website Monetization, authored a ‘how to’ book called ‘‘Mastering Your Website’, and is a key player in several Internet related businesses through his search engine strategy brand Searchen Networks®
It ranks #1 easy being EMD like SO many examples. The haters like to say it’s not true, but i find newtld with EMD not only one first page, but #1 All THE TIME. Google has been lying, domain has a lot more weight (lately) than they are leading on.
CTR plays a role too, users LIKE clicking these new ones, That’s part of the reason they rank so high and fast, people click them! Ship.Cars has just as much if not more initial authority as shipcars.com to the customers. So while it might not exactly be domain weight, it’s the CTR + time on page + next search query that play the very big roles. NewTLD is an EDGE in a .com dominated world lol, no1 see it?
Never rely on Google to tell the truth about anything related to its core life-line, its algorithms.
Ranks for term with no volume, that isn’t hard. The correct term would be “car shipping”.
The domain name OBVIOUSLY didn’t hurt their perception of trustworthiness in the consumer’s mind – or Goggle ranking for that matter.
The gap in credibility for consumers between the EMD dot-com and alternative extensions is clearly shrinking.
Interesting to see that the #2 spot on Google (searching SHIP CARS) is a bizarre name: ShipaCarDirect.com, followed by AutoTransportDirect.com.
You’d think that the second, or third…or tenth…spot would be ShipCars.com…but, nope.
Thinking about it I’m actually more inclined to trust ship.cars “because” i know the owner of the business is paying $2000 a year for their name. Adds legitimacy and makes me think they are strong being able to afford that kind of yearly cost
99.9% of consumers won’t have any clue what the yearly domain renewal cost is though.
I don’t think business owners are that clueless about their marketing decisions and what they spend money on.
i doubt people are typing ship.cars in the their browser…
i think all the customers are coming from google and other search engines…and once on their website, they search for prices and find a good deal so they book it…and the customers don’t even know they are on ship.cars
If you ask 100 random people if they saw ship.cars on a truck, would they think it’s an url…
I don’t think so.
they are getting their customers from search engines.
since they are a real money making business, they should buy the .com
With a first page Google result they don’t need to be concerned with what people are typing into the browser. For them, search is the key: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=ship%20cars&geo=US
All they have to do is search for “ship cars” – no dot is needed.
–
They are getting organic customers from page 1 without paying for ads. Google doesn’t regard the dot. That’s how a site like http://www.arizona.cars ranks #1 on Google organically for searches for “arizona cars.” They built a site with content that supports the keywords.
–
Not bad for results without wasting time haggling over the .com.
If you are page 1 on a search term that gets no searches are you really on the first page?
Nobody talks about Vacation.Rentals anymore for $500K. Last I checked it dropped down to middle of 2nd page, and VacationRentals.com was #1 on 1st page.
66 visitors to their site a month? Is this a good example?
At the end of the day its an EMD matching what users are looking for. In this case the extension makes it an EMD.
I just checked: They are no 1 in the UK as well !!! Right below paid adds and above shipcars.co.uk ! So looks like the future belongs to new gtlds
GTLD = Good To Lose Dollars