1 Your visitors expect you to be on .com.

With the exception of German, UK, French or other country-specific sites, visitors default to .com. When they hear about your business, they’re going to assume it will be on a .com. If they remember the name and try looking it up later on the .com, you should be there! Owners of other extensions always lose some traffic to the .com.

2 Google will like you better.

This is true for .com, .net and .org over other extensions, but most of all for .com. Google recognizes that most of the largest most trusted sites online are on .com and as such gives preference to .com in search results. Google sites like Google.co.uk and Google.de do however give preference to the respective local extensions over .com in most cases.

3 Return on investment

A new (non-premium) domain name might cost about $15 a year, but a premium domain might cost from several hundred to a couple thousand dollars for the initial year. Every year thereafter, however, the renewal defaults to the same price it would cost to keep any other domain active. You need to consider the return on investment. Besides the fact that you can register a memorable name that best describes your business, premium domains come with a history of keyword searches through search engines like Google®, Bing®, and Yahoo!®. This means that the premium name often comes with the prebuilt traffic and searches that regular domains will take years to acquire. And that’s priceless.